Seeing progress and feeling good

This week we have started reaching out to graduate programs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. So far we have emailed Brock, Carleton, Lakehead, Laurentian, McMaster, Trent, Windsor and Wilfred Laurier universities to encourage graduate students to register with us. And we have seen our first registrations roll in!

Graduate students are a great target audience to start. Attending conferences is an important aspect of their development as a researcher and an integral part in their academic trajectory. You get to share your work with your research community, learn about other research being done, speak with people in your discipline, and there are often opportunities for feedback and mentorship. A significant portion of participants in many conferences are graduate students. Not to mention participating in conferences is important to their grant applications, but so too are community outreach activities. We hope to leverage all of this and look forward to getting graduate students involved with us and in classrooms across Canada.

While we have not yet begun our email campaign on the classroom side of things, our social media presence has benefited us and we have seen our first registrations on that side of things too.

It is nice to see Conference2Classroom get some traction so early on. We've a long way to go, but it is encouraging to see how receptive people have been.