Thanks to the Herbert E Carter Travel Award I could attend to two meetings, the Meeting of the Colombian Zoological Society and the Meeting of the Association for the study of Wild bees. Both of these meeting involved people not only from research groups from the local country (Colombia) but also from other regions of South America (Brasil, Ecuador, Venezuela, Peru), Central America (Panama, Guatemala, Costa Rica), North America (United States) and Europe (Spain).

One of the advantages of a large meeting including different areas of research is the possibility to discuss results and ideas from different perspectives. For me, as a graduate student with Interdisciplinary training, it was a perfect place to interact with other students and professors focusing in areas such as Ecology, Evolutionary Biology and genetics. Also of great importance for me was the possibility to show my research involving the integration of Neurobiology, Cognitive Sciences and Ecology, which are traditionally studied as separate disciplines. My presentation not only attempted to present interesting and novel results, but also to bring enthusiasm about research in this fields in the local academic environments, traditionally focus on Ecology. By the end of the meetings I was very happy and satisfied for the excitement that I could create in undergraduate students who are starting to plan their final thesis.

In short, I want to emphasize the great advantage that I could take of my attendance to these two meetings because of the multiple disciplines present in the different symposiums.