Antrelle's Declassified LOREX Survival Guide: the realities of adapting - AGAIN, through the LOREX "UNICORN" lens

Life is all about having a backup plan for the backup plan, which is no different in graduate school. Graduate school is a place where students often only have opportunities through their primary institution, something a group of PhDs experienced firsthand and recognized as a problem. That’s why they created the Limnology and Oceanography Research EXchange (LOREX) program. In Summer 2023, I had the opportunity to participate in my first LOREX exchange (cohort three), which, research-wise, didn’t go so well. A lot of unexpected anomalies impacted my project, and I had to start thinking about a backup plan. That’s when I first started to realize that even the smallest things may require a Plan B or C-Z. Originally, I was awarded a second LOREX grant to go back in Summer 2024 as part of cohort four, but those plans changed, marking another shift in primary direction. Simultaneously, my research at my home institution completely changed too, requiring me to learn a whole new set of skills and work with a different model organism for my dissertation. That shift not only impacted my dissertation work, but also my research focus and the questions I planned to bring into the LOREX program, and for a while, I was unsure of which direction to go. Eventually, I was able to participate in my second LOREX exchange with cohort five during Summer 2025. Of course, there were bumps in the road where backup plans had to be created on the fly almost every day as we started to figure out what worked, what didn’t, what was efficient, and how to adjust things to still get the data we needed in such a short amount of time. Do you see where I’m going with this? Somewhere along the way, I realized that I wasn’t just navigating challenges. I was constantly adapting in ways that made my path look very different from everyone else’s, which eventually led to my nickname: the “UNICORN” of the LOREX program. This talk will highlight the never-ending cycle of adapting on the fly in dissertation research and international collaborative science, which is applicable to any aspect of life. If you don’t remember anything from my presentation, just remember one word, or a synonym of it: “adaptability” and that “it is better to be overprepared than underprepared.

Presentation Preference: No Preference

Primary Presenter: Antrelle Clark, Auburn University (antrelleclark@gmail.com)

Authors:

Manuel Coffill-Rivera, The University of South Alabama  (manuelcoffill@gmail.com)