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Why ASPB membership is good for a graduate student:
Proposals due, classes, experiments to finish, meetings, and seminars- how can a graduate student have the time or energy to join ASPB? Besides that, we all know graduate students aren’t rich, why spend the money every year to be an ASPB member? Other than the altruistic and community based reasons, which will be presented in another posting, there are practical benefits for every graduate student to join ASPB. In fact, I would be willing to say you are hurting your graduate school experience and job preparation if you are not an active member, and this is true no matter what type of work you are interested in pursuing, from teaching, to industry, public servant, or academics.
To outline the benefits of ASPB membership, I will outline by year how ASPB can help a graduate student. The goal of this posting is to break down the benefits into smaller lists, this doesn’t mean that the benefits listed for a first year student won't be useful for a fifth year student and vica versa.
The first year . . .
Rotation projects, taking classes, settling in to a new town, deciding on a lab that will be your home for the next 4-5 years, choosing a worthy thesis project so you can finish in time with lots of papers . . . How can ASPB help in the first year?
E-mail notifications- With everything you have going on, it will be hard to keep on top of knowing when the latest issues of Plant Cell Plant Cell and Plant Physiology come out- take a load off your mind and set up your reminders. You can even set it up to search for specific topics, if you are working on heavy metal toxicity you can set things up so you get an e-mail every time a publication comes out in these journals on heavy metal toxicity. Other programs are available for e-mail notification, one of my favorites is Pubcrawler , although not specifically for plant journals, it is useful for keeping track of what's happening in GenBank and PubMed, besides, they have a cute slogan "It goes to the Library; you go to the Pub(TM)"
Sectional meetings- If there is an ASPB sectional meeting near you, try to get there! There are more details on these meetings under the second year heading, but if you can get there your first year, it will help you that much more.
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