Kevin Wang — My Experience at the Europe Geoscience Union General Assembly 2024

Between 15th of April to 19th of April, the Europe Geoscience Union General Assembly (EGU) was held in the Austria Vienna Center. And I’m very honored to have the opportunity to participate in the event. The assembly started from Monday (15th April) to Friday (19th April), and I participated for two days. Over 20,000 professionals have participated in this event.

I visited the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Science’s research center in Beijing last summer. I met with one of the professors there, who gave me the opportunity to experience this event while with their participation. She thought that I held great interests in the field of environmental science. I was truly amazed by even going to the research center, so I was very surprised that they gave me this opportunity to this even where scientists, researchers came from all over the world to meet to have an “academic exchange”.

I participated as part of the CRAES team, who were specialists in water environment science. Furthermore, I was very lost during the first day of participation, as I was overwhelmed by the presentations and the amount of people there. There are different rooms given for each field of science, which includes such as Atmospheric Science, Biogeosciences, Geodynamics, Hydrological Science, Ocean Science, Soil System Science, etc. I have mainly joined the presentations from masters and professors from the field of soil system science. Each of them presented about the experiments and projects that are held by them, and most of them have published papers regarding their results. Even tho, I didn’t understand most of the professional statistics that were presented. But I was still very interested in them. I was surprised by how similar my presentation was to theirs (not trying to say I have good presentations), which the structure and style was very close. After the first day of participation, I was a bit overwhelmed, but I still joined the third day of the conference. 

I believe the EGU General Assembly wants specialists to communicate to each other and developed new ideas regarding their own field, but also other fields of science. So for the second day of my participation. I helped with the CRAES team to put up their own poster about a thesis about rare-earth mining’s impact on river and N2O emissions. With more preparation and experience, I knew what to do and where to go for the second day of the conference. I joined different rooms of presentation that I were interested in, such as Carbon Cycle in Ocean, Peatland restoration, Carbon dynamics in terrestrial ecosystems, and Soil pollution. I have listened and amazed by the records and statistics from these presentations. Furthermore, I have listened for about 3 hours to multiple halls and topics. 

So these are my two-day participation in the EGU General Assembly. I think it did not only have an impact on my academic experience, but also a vision in my future career. This experience gave me great motivations for my future study and hard work as I gave my self a goal of being able to be officially invited or attend as a professional in my future career. And last, I would like to thank again to the CRAES team who gave me this wonderful experience at this event.

This post was written by Kevin Wang