The Early Career Chemistry Education Scholars (ECCES) are a committee dedicated to the recruitment and networking of graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and early faculty members (pre-tenure if on tenure track) in chemistry education research. This population is vital to the long-term goals of chemistry education research, and we hope will be the future leaders and contributors to DivCHED.
Since our last report we have accomplished the following items preparing for BCCE 2024.
- Organized the Graduate Student Research symposia. This symposia ran for 15 sessions, provided presiding opportunities for 21 graduates students to preside over sessions, and hosted 58 speakers. So far attendance has been ~10-30 attendees at each session.
- Organized a Birds of a Feather social event on Monday afternoon. 61 participates signed in to the event. We facilitated Networking Bingo and encouraged people to participate by entering people who got a "bingo" into a raffle. We drew 5 names and gave 5 $50 Visa giftcards as prizes. We used this opportunity to encourage attendees to join DivCHED if they are not already members.
Organized an "informal" networking event on Saturday evening at BCCE. Our committee members invited graduate students, postdocs, and early career folks to meet a restaurant downtown on Saturday evening. There ~70 people in attendance networking.
In addition to our BCCE preparations, this committee revised our Operations Manual to reflect our current practices. We have also discussed how our current activities align and support the DivCHED strategic plan and our potential areas of growth.
Our committee will host the Graduate Student symposium at the Spring 2025 ACS. We have begun preparations for that. We hope to plan a social in San Diego. We are also brainstorming ideas for adding more asynchronous networking opportunities in the absence of a large conference in Summer 2025 as well as reviving essential professional development opportunities to support job searching, peer review, and grant seeking for graduate students, postdocs, and early career folks. Finally, we will reflect on how we can strengthen committee activities at the 2026 BCCE learning from the current 2024 conference.
$300 approved for 2024
We spent $275 to purchase Visa gift cards as raffle prizes at our BCCE BoaF event.
Offering raffle prizes encouraged folks to network for the full 45 min event to be entered into the drawing. We had over 60 attendees at the event.