UBC Lab Meeting & Vancouver Tourist-ing

In grad school something that has surprised me is how often there are opportunities to travel both within Canada and internationally. I am extremely grateful for these opportunities and feel lucky to have the advisor that I do supporting me/ encouraging me!

Step one is always the planning and creation of what I’ll be presenting. For this meeting I presented my MSc work that I defended last October so it has been a few months since I’d presented it last. I made some changes to the presentation and practiced at home, on the plane to BC, and in my hotel room the night before. Sometimes travelling for conferences/ meetings is daunting as it is a cost to the lab so of course I want to present myself and my work well! Being prepared is key.

Wednesday – Travel day

The meeting was Thursday and Friday so Wednesday and Saturday were my travel days. My flight was at 11am from Toronto and I arrived in Vancouver around 1pm Vancouver time, the flight is ~5 hours but it is 3 hours earlier in Vancouver than in Toronto area. This left me with lots of time to train and bus to the University of British Columbia (UBC). This campus is massive!! Way bigger than my home campus at UofG.

For the meeting that I was there for I stayed on campus in the Gage Suites so that I would be walking distance to the meeting. UBC is pretty surrounded by a park so staying off campus would have been a much longer commute to and from the meeting! These accommodations were a 20-ish minute walk from the building the meeting was in.

I wandered campus and stopped at Sesame for dinner. It was yummy, I had a beef fried noodle and some dumplings! I was pretty tired from the travel day so just relaxed in my room and practiced my presentation until it was time to go to sleep.

Thursday – Meeting day!

With the time difference I woke up at 5:30am… If you know me you know that I am not really a morning person but this would have been 8:30am at home so I was bright eyed and bushy tailed and ready to go! I had lots of time so I got ready and wandered around until the Body Energy Club opened for me to get myself a smoothie for breakfast.

The meeting started at 8:30am so my advisor and I met around 7:50am and walked over to the building it was in, grabbing coffee en route.

The meetings were discussions of the various projects being worked on and how collaborations were going between the different universities involved, as well as preliminary findings. I presented my MSc research in the morning block of presentations and felt much more relaxed after I’d finished. The question period is always a little daunting but getting feedback and questions from scientists in my field of agriculture and sustainability is usually fun and conversational which is nice.

The research I’d presented is about the impact of feeding angus heifers that I’d previously classified as high or low methane emitters a methane mitigation feed additive, I used canola oil for this. Some interesting findings that I had were that yes, canola oil does reduce enteric methane emissions from the cattle and that the classification of high and low methane emitter persisted throughout the trial. I’ll make a new blog post with more details when I’ve published the work in a peer reviewed journal!

During the lunch break our UBC host took us on a walk around campus and it was so pretty! One of my favourite spots we looked at was the UBC rose garden.

After the meetings and presentations we went out for dinner and for a walk to Wreck Beach on campus (if you are going just know this is a clothing optional beach!). For dinner we went to the Brown’s Craft House on campus. It was delish, I had a passionfruit sour beer and some fish tacos! Wreck Beach is the best spot for watching the sunset on campus in my opinion. I’ve been to UBC campus a couple of times before and always try to catch a sunset there. It is 500-ish steps down and back up though to go and leave from the beach… Definitely a bit of a workout.

Friday – Last bit of meetings and TOURIST-ING!!

We had another two hours of meetings Friday morning. There were some super interesting conversations about the rumen microbiome that I need to read more about for my own methane work!

After those presentations the advisors all had a meeting without us students so I decided to book a whale watching tour. It was fantastic! I went with Wild Whales Vancouver in a zodiac boat off of Granville Island. The tour was about 5 hours and we saw at least 15 humpback whales (some people were saying we saw 21 but I can’t tell who is a repeat or not haha), a bunch of harbour seals, and both Steller and California sea lions! It was a beautiful tour and the guide was fantastic. She could identify the humpbacks by their flukes (tails!). There were a bunch of mom whales and their calves swimming together. Everyone on the tour was wearing flotation wetsuits which are so puffy, but keep you warm and dry-ish if you fall off the boat (but this is a very rare occurrence, just a safety precaution!), the suits look so silly though with how poofy they are haha. The whales don’t photograph well since they’re under water except for the flick of their tail which I only got on video so I can’t show you them unfortunately, but they were beautiful! Something more impressive in person than through a phone screen anyways.

I ended my night with going out for dinner on Granville Island at The Vancouver Fish Company and had their seafood linguini which was yummy, and I was starving after the whale tour!!

After this I headed back to campus and had an early night, I was tired after the day on the water.

Saturday – Travel day

Before heading home I checked out one more spot on campus, the Nitobe Memorial Garden. It was so pretty and a nice relaxing place to sit and wind down after the couple of busy days in Vancouver before my flight home.

After this I went to the airport and flew home! Didn’t land back in ON until about 10:30pm and baggage took a while to come out (they had a bunch of us check our carry ons otherwise I could have just gotten out of there!) so I didn’t get out of the airport until almost midnight. Needless to say I slept in the next morning!

Cheers!