Support Student Member Attendance at the 2015 Annual Meeting
Lindsay Bullock, SBM senior media and member communications manager
At the Society of Behavioral Medicine’s (SBM) 2014 Annual Meeting, student member Yaguang Zheng got raw data for research on weight loss behavior and attended a technology-focused session she’d been eagerly looking forward to. Zheng also got to meet Bonnie Spring, whose work she’d long admired.
Zheng had a wonderful time and learned a lot—but that almost didn’t happen. Without SBM’s donor-funded Student Volunteer Program, Zheng would not have been able to afford to come to the Annual Meeting.
The program pays the annual meeting registration fees of student/trainee SBM members like Zheng in exchange for their time; the students must volunteer at the meeting, doing things like working the registration desk and taking tickets from pre-conference session attendees.
Zheng, a PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh, worked the registration desk and said it was incredibly worth it.
“The waived fee…made [meeting attendance] possible,” she said, explaining costs added up even though the meeting was reasonably priced and her school provided some travel funding. “If the conference is in a big city, it costs a lot!”
SBM would like to help more students like Zheng, who know annual meeting attendance can be beneficial to their careers but who lack the necessary funds to make the trip. Unfortunately, the number of Student Volunteer Program applicants often exceeds the funding available. You can change that.
A donation of any dollar amount will help SBM fund more student volunteer slots for deserving student/trainee SBM members. More dollars mean more slots, and that means more student attendance at SBM annual meetings. It also means more students invested in SBM and able to make headway in the field of behavioral medicine.
