These resources are based at the University of Washington, but are potentially relevant for prospective biology and ecology graduate students anywhere.

• Graduate Funding Information Service - service through UW libraries with resources, workshops and staff available to help find funding sources for prospective and current graduate students
  • GFIS blog - subscribe for new posts to be emailed, or search blog based on academic level, citizenship requirements, eligibility based on specific identities, and type of support provided. Funding opportunities here include funding sources for all disciplines (not just science) both internal and external to UW, so worth a look even if you are not planning to apply to UW.
• All School of Aquatic & Fisheries Sciences (SAFS) seminar series. These seminars are typically open to the public, and are an excellent way to learn about cutting edge research in fisheries sciences, management and quantitative methods. Seminars to pay particular attention to are:
  • For those interested in QERM or quantitative methods in general, check out SAFS's quantitative seminar, which runs for fall, winter and spring quarters on Fridays from 12:30 - 1:30. Future seminar information is here, and recordings of seminars starting in 2016 can be found here. 
    • I frequently attended these seminars before applying to QERM, and it gave me a good idea of the breadth and depth of the field of quantitative ecology, although I usually had very little understanding of what the speakers were talking about (other than the broadest strokes), as the statistical and mathematical methods were well beyond my knowledge at the time. Speakers are frequently drawn from the UW grad student and postdoc community, so this seminar is also a good way to get a sense of what different labs (and therefore potential advisors) are working on, sometimes more accurately than can be found on their websites.
  • Cultivating inclusive conservation practices, a one-time seminar series from fall 2020, is a good resource for the different ways that scientists are engaging with communities around conservation. This website includes speaker profiles and suggested readings, and here are the presentation recordings (scroll down to see the rest of the playlist).

Allyship is a journey, not a destination. All allies make mistakes and there are many ways that an ally can cause just as much harm as good to those they seek to support. Sometimes they can cause grievous harm, specifically because they were deemed safe in their professed roles as allies. Advocates, defined here as allies who speak on behalf of communities that they don’t belong to, are particularly vulnerable to causing harm to the communities they are trying to advocate for.

My personal belief is that in most circumstances this kind of direct advocacy (driven by people external to a community, in contrast to self advocacy) is not, in the long run, truly helpful and should be avoided whenever possible. Most of the time, allyship is best demonstrated by stepping back to support self-advocates speaking for themselves and their communities. However, there are plenty of instances when direct advocacy happens anyway, and there are even circumstances where it is truly necessary, such as when members of a community are effectively barred from accessing the levers of power that would relieve their oppression.