Hi i am currently doing a mres and have been accepetd to do a PhD in St Anderws in October looking at allocation of biodiversity hotpsots based on phylogenetic and trait diversity. At the moment my feeling is when i finish my PhD i want to move into working for charaties or conservation organisations(national trust, marine conservation society, JNCC etc..)

I have spoke to my supervisor and he thinks i should start 'rubbing' shoulders with people i.e networking. One of the best ways is through conferences. The problem is i am moving to a new field and therefore my masters contatcs arent very helpfull. I have had a look through google and cant find a website advertising conferences? Does such a website exist or is it a case of checking many websites and hoping to stumble along a conference? I understand when i start my PhD it will be easier but i was hoping to attend some before this.

Thanks

One would assume that an accepted PhD student at St Andrews would have the ability, intelligence and determination to follow this up through additional, more extensive Google searches. Read journals in your new field, become a member of professional bodies and the invitations will spam up your mailbox. But please don't ask silly questions.

www.conferencealerts.com
also, look up www.jiscmail.ac.uk - this is a resource for academic mailing lists, and if you sign up you can receive info and conference alerts.

jouri, asking for help IS a sign of intelligence. And surely talking to other PhD students (in other words: posting on this forum) is a way of finding out about conferences, tantamount to extensive Google searching.

cmcowen, you might find something on: http://evol.mcmaster.ca/brian/evoldir.html

Click on conferences. It's a bit more academic population genetics orientated, but I recall seeing things about conservation genetics on there before.

There are questions and silly questions. In my opinion, the original posters' question belongs to the latter category. But I might be wrong.

thank very much for peoples help; regarding google searches of course i shall do these things i.e read journals etc, as you say i am doing a masters now and have been accepted to do a PhD and therefore i do know how to research. I was just after some advice from other people not asking them to do all the 'hard' work for me.

Well actually I have found it quite hard to pin down the relevant conferences and welcome any advice on searching for them. Maybe it depends on your subject - but it's not always that straight forward. I regularly search for conferences but nearly missed one last year at MY OWN uni until a friend in Canada asked if I was going! (And I am not espeically stupid - honest!)

The conference alert website is great, thanks for posting. I found 2 conference with call for papers out for which I want to submit an abstract. Although I try very hard to keep up with what is going on, I was not aware of these, and was delighted to find them.