NAYGN Adapts to the Pandemic Posture

The current pandemic has changed the 2020 landscape for all of us, including NAYGN. Our largest annual event, our professional development conference during the Nuclear Energy Assembly, has been cancelled. However, NAYGN and our members are hungry for the focus and energy we bring to the young generation of nuclear professionals. As such, we are actively working through ways to bring you the unique conference later this year. Whether it be professional development workshops, nuclear advocacy sessions, or networking opportunities with your peers, the NAYGN conference planning committee has a great set of topics and ideas curated for this year, and we plan to deliver.

Regarding conference material, the NAYGN Board and the Conference Committee are working through three main options:

• Showcasing material in regional conferences
• Sharing the material in an online webinar format
• Transforming the material to be at-your-own-pace content where members can engage at their own convenience.

Our key conference meetings will still go on. We're working now to schedule our Local Chapter Leads and Regional Leads face-to-face meetings to an online schedule and format. For all these meetings, we expect to utilize a tool like Zoom and we're currently planning to hold these meetings during the week of May 18 – 22.

Our Hill Day initiatives are certainly dependent on COVID-19 and what is socially responsible, as is our Clean Energy Summit. These are two events our organization certainly values and we will patiently wait for the right opportunity to make sure our generation's voice can be heard.

Beyond this, NAYGN will continue to offer our regional conferences, drawing contest, nuclear science week engagement, targeted political advocacy, annual awards, and all the other content our members and sponsors have come to rely on and value.  Our members have already taken this time to field online networking events, virtual classroom visits, home technology tips, home-based book readings, and many more great events.  We also plan to increase our social media presence to highlight these initiatives and share how NAYGN continues to be impactful within our industry and communities.

We know 2020 will be different, but in times where change and transformation are needed I couldn't imagine a better prepared team to work with.  We'll see you all online!