Taja Pajmon Rak, UP FAMNIT

General

Taja Pajmon Rak is a graduate of the Biodiversity programme and is currently completing her master’s degree in Nature Conservation UP FAMNIT.

After finishing her lectures, she worked at the faculty for quite some time and, as a student, assisted in promoting various activities and programmes. She is currently employed at the Center znanosti University of Primorskem, which includes both the Aquarium Piran and the Archaeological Park Simonov zaliv.

How and why did you decide to study Biodiversity at University of Primorska Faculty of Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Information Technologies?

In truth, throughout secondary school I kept many options open, mainly because I had always been interested in many different fields — from mathematics and chemistry to history, psychology, and biology.

At some point, I decided to limit myself to studying in Koper, which automatically narrowed my options a bit. From there onward, the decision became fairly simple. I was deciding between Biodiversity and Bioinformatics, but I wanted more fieldwork, so I chose Biodiversity — and I definitely did not make a mistake. It was probably one of the best decisions I could have made.

Later, when I attended several lectures in Ljubljana during the following years, I truly realized why I preferred our programme: interdisciplinarity, smaller study groups, and opportunities for additional activities.

Which knowledge and skills acquired during your studies are most useful in your current work?

My current work is not entirely biological in nature, which might perhaps be what graduates of this programme would expect.

Already during my studies, I was very active in the student council and in various student projects, and I believe that gave me even more experience and connections than the studies themselves. I gained experience in coordination, event organization, public speaking, science communication and education promotion, and even in understanding and handling bureaucracy.

At the same time, my studies enabled me to become involved in all these additional activities. If I look strictly at the study programme itself, I can say that it definitely gave me breadth, openness, and critical thinking skills.

I especially appreciated the fact that we did not deal solely with biology in a narrow sense, but also with broader topics such as social aspects, management of protected areas, project writing, and similar subjects. All of this is useful even in everyday life.

You are also one of the key organizers of the Biological-Psychological Student Conference, which is being organized this year at the University of Primorska (FAMNIT) for the second time. What is the programme and the goal of the conference?

That is true. The idea for organizing the conference emerged in 2020, and we held the first edition in autumn 2021.

The conference programme is very diverse and includes presentations of student papers, posters, lectures by invited speakers, and a rich social programme. This year, for example, we invited one of the Slovenian writers to present his books about depression, and we also collaborated with Dr. Ženko, with whom we watched and discussed a documentary film about the issue of damming rivers.

The goal of the conference is probably similar to that of all other academic conferences: spreading knowledge, presenting one’s work, meeting other students and alumni from the field, and, of course, building new friendships.

What makes our conference special is that it is one of the very few student conferences in our region.

What does the preparation process for such a conference look like behind the scenes, and what are the biggest challenges in organizing it?

Very dynamic! I must say, however, that this year things were much easier.

Last year, when we organized the conference for the first time, it was far more demanding. We had significantly more and much longer meetings, more work, and more sleepless nights. We essentially had to build everything from the ground up.

We created the website entirely from scratch, figured out how to collect and review submissions, determined the appropriate level of scientific rigor, selected the expert committee, set deadlines, planned promotion strategies, and tried to figure out how to reach potential participants.

This year, we already knew how things should be organized, whom to contact, and where we had made mistakes previously, which allowed us to improve many things.

As with any kind of work, however, the biggest challenge is definitely working with people

What are your plans for the future?

Those of us who initiated the conference are no longer students, so with this year’s edition we already announced that we are stepping away from the organization.

At the same time, we sincerely hope the event will continue, which is why we have been encouraging younger students for quite some time to take over the organization and continue developing the project further.

We believe we have built solid foundations — now it simply needs to continue and perhaps gradually be improved even further.

Next year, most of the main organizers from the biological sciences will also be organizing the international biology student symposium SymBioSE, and because of that we will not have enough time to organize two major events simultaneously.

However, we are very happy that this year several enthusiastic students approached us during the conference and expressed interest in continuing our work, so we place great hope in them. Of course, we will remain available to help and support them, but in general the organization should now be taken over by younger generations.

After all, anyone who undertakes something like this gains an enormous amount of knowledge and experience that remains valuable throughout life. And in the end, beautiful memories and strong friendships remain as well — which certainly matters too.