SHAPING THE FUTURE •
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Things can only get better
2020 was a year of constantly shifting aspirations, which played a huge part in what made it so tough – what we thought we knew for sure kept changing. This was especially true for our ECS members who have faced continuous uncertainty and upheaval throughout the year. At the start of 2020 I figured that if I managed to do all the work that I had planned and attend all the conferences I’d booked on to then I could travel around, show off my research and maybe even come away with a paper to show for all my hard work. Last January I got on to it – ordering consumables, training on new equipment, learning to code, applying for travel grants, and I even made the poster I would present at the ECS Symposium! By the end of February, I was all set and ready to start putting all that groundwork into action. Less than a month later all the conferences were cancelled, the lab was closed, and I was stuck at home. I told myself this would last for a month or two and then we would have got the situation under control to be able to return to work. The news definitely made it seem like lockdown would only be a few weeks, so I focused on cancelling the train tickets I had booked to get to conferences and set about promising myself I would get through the backlog of unread papers I had been accumulating since the start of my PhD.
What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know; it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so Mark Twain
Caleb Marsh ECS Committee Lead Communications Officer
10
microbiologist
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March 2021
www.sfam.org.uk
