BGSA Orientation!

Hello BGSAers old and new!

The leaves are turning, politics are simmering, and it's getting darker sooner... We all know what that means - the start of a new semester! As always, we want to welcome new students (and returning students!) with open arms and get them on the proper path to the maze that's called grad school.

The BGSA will be holding orientation this semester on Thursday, September 6. We've got things going all day, but it will culminate in a FREE BBQ on the reservoir from 4-6pm.

Here's the plan, so we'll see everyone on Thursday!
For new students!
12:30-1:00 The Biology Department and You: A guide to graduate school at McGill
1:00-1:30 Lunch with BGSA officers
1:30-2:30 Scavenger Hunt  

Everyone!
4:00-6:00 FREE BBQ

Cheers
The BGSA

BGSA General Meeting!

Hello students,

Now that summer is already over, the BGSA will be holding a general meeting in the Redpath Auditorium from 4-5 on March 28th. The Agenda is below! See you there.

Cheers

BGSA

Biology Graduate Students Association General Meeting AGENDA

March 28, 2012

4-5pm

Redpath Auditorium

1. Committee reports

a. AGSEM (Justin Marleau)

b. PGSS (Eric Pedersen)

c. Green (Etienne Low-Decarie)

d. Safety (Corey Chivers)

e. Organismal seminar (Andrea Reid)

2. Changes to Molecular Seminar Funding (Aleksandar Vujin)

3. Update on Biodiversity Position Search (Justin Marleau)

4. Petition for Advanced Statistics Course (Kiyoko Gotanda)

5. Announcement of elections (Monica Granados)

6. Travel Grant (Katie Pagnucco)

7. Upcoming events

a. April

i. Egg hunt

ii. CEEB retreat

b. May

i. End of year party

ii. MOC retreat

8. Other business

Montreal R User Group is live!!

Hello UseRs!

We are happy to announce that the Montreal R User Group is now official. You can join the group by visiting the meetup site.

The group has existed since 2010 in a narrower incarnation as the BGSA R/Stats Workshop Series. Previous workshops have featured invited facilitators on topics such as Causal Analysis, GLMs, GAMs, Multi-model inference, Phylogenetic analysis, Bayesian modeling, Meta-analysis, Ordination, Programming and more. Our goal is to broaden the scope of the workshops to incorporate topics from a wide variety of applied fields.

We are kicking off with a meetup on Monday, March 19th with a workshop on building and estimating Maximum Likelihood models and doing model selection.

We look forward to seeing you at the next meetup!

Montreal R User Group Organizers

WordPress Workshop!

Good news! The WordPress workshop has been rescheduled and it's still FREE. See below for registration instructions.

Do you wish you could have your own website so you can disseminate your research, publications or pictures of you in a row boat (http://tinyurl.com/85ry26v)? Well then do I have some good news for you. BGSA is hosting a WordPress workshop on Friday, February 10, 2012 from 10:00-11:30 in Stewart Biology W2/3B. WordPress (http://wordpress.org/) is a user friendly, free, web software you can use to create your own website. Sidra Mamood (http://www.oneseventyfive.com/) a web designer from Toronto will guide you from inception to the publication of your very own website. And best of all, the workshop is FREE!

Space is limited though, so if you want to attend sign-up at the following link (click or copy and paste the link): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Am30GsVd1jhrdGFqNU9HOGpKQTZoWVJfbFJXcjNXWGc

If you are already signed up then your place is reserved. If you can no longer attend the rescheduled workshop please remove your name so that the space becomes available for other participants.

-Monica on behalf of the BGSA Officers

R/Statistics Workshop Series Starts Next Monday!

BGSA R/Statistics Workshop Series Starts Monday February 6.

We are excited to announced the start of the BGSA organized R/Statistics workshop Winter series! The workshops provide an excellent opportunity for graduate students to surmount the seemingly steep R learning curve and advance their statistical skills.

The Winter series, facilitated by invited graduate students and faculty, begins Monday, February 6th 14h-16h in N4/17. It will continue weekly over ten sessions and tentatively cover the following topics:

• Programming in R
• Linear, generalized and additive mixed-effects models
• Path analysis, structural equations and causal inference (invited speaker: Bill Shipley)
• Likelihood estimation
• Bayesian statistics
• Time series analysis
• Spatial statistics

For more information, complete schedule, and workshop descriptions see:
https://sites.google.com/site/mcgillbgsa/workshops

The workshops are free to attend, but space may be limited so students are encouraged to register at:
https://sites.google.com/site/mcgillbgsa/register

Corey, Zofia, Étienne and Eric

BGSA R/Statistics Workshop Series Organizers