I'm off to the big ecology meeting in Milwaukee so things should be quiet here at Professor Chaos for the next week. I may try to blog from the meeting, but I'm not making any promises. Afterall, writing blogs ain't meeting people...well, actually I seem to meet a lot of people writing blogs, so that's not technically true...anyway, you know what I mean.
See you all on the flip side!
In less than a week, Milwaukee will be over-run by a few thousand people. These people will undoubtedly stand out from the local populace; they will be wearing Tevas or Chacos (I've supplied a link for those who have no idea what I' m talking about) and often shorts, t-shirts, fleece (in our defense it is often really cold in those convention centers), and pieces of clothing by Columbia, Mountain Hardware, and other outdoor outfitters. Most tellingly, many of them will be carrying a tote bag and forget to take their name badges off when they leave the conference center...yes, the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America is descending on Milwaukee. Woohoo!
When I was a graduate student I hated this meeting. It is large (almost 5,000 people) with 25-30 concurrent sessions of talks. It is so easy to feel lost and overwhelmed. I would try to see talks constantly from 8 am to 5 pm, yet I always seemed to miss the talks everyone was abuzz about. Friend: "Did you see that fabulous talk by Dr. Amazing? I think it altered my whole view on exciting area Y". Me: "What?" (Flipping frantically through the schedule of talks) "How did I miss that? No, I was stuck in this pointless talk about boring area Z given by Dr How-the-hell-did-he-get-a-Ph.D".
Ironically, it was only when I gave up on the meeting as being pointless that I actually found it valuable. Since I always seemed to be wasting my time in talks irrelevant to my research, I started contacting friends and collaborators before hand to see if they would be there and wanted to meet about projects, life, whatever. I also stopped trying to see as many talks as possible and started applying a triage system - big names talking on new ideas, research coming out of labs I am often citing, and talks by people I have never heard of but seem directly relevant to my current or future research directions. If there is nothing I want to see, then I try to schedule that time to interact with colleagues. Suddenly, I was seeing the talks relevant to me and getting valuable work and networking done.
This year may be different for me. Most of my close colleagues and collaborators aren't going this year. This means that this is the first year in a while where I won't have my core set of people to interact with. I've been trying to figure out what this means for my conference going experience and I have come to one, dreaded, conclusion....I will have to meet new people (shudder). I say this because I am the world's worst networker. Strangely, if someone approaches me, I have no problem talking cogently. If I approach someone else, it all goes to hell...quickly. I suspect that it has to do with some perceived onus of responsibility for the conversation. If I am taking up someone else's time, I better be brilliant and witty, but I have no such expectations if someone approaches me.
Since I am such a horrible networker, I've decided to attend as many of the official social events as possible - the various "(Insert name here) mixers". Events with food and alcohol are useful crutches for me....if I don't like the social interaction I am stuck in I can swill my drink and go get another or if I say something wrong, I can buy myself some time to think my way out of it by gobbling some goodies.
I assume that someday networking won't be so awful. I assume that someday I'll realize that it's not that I'm so bad at it, but that we are all pretty bad at it (which is why people who are good at it get such advantages - but that's another post). In the meantime, I will don my Chacos, gird myself with my plate of food and my drink, and go once more into the breach....and you never know, maybe I'll even meet someone who will become part of that group of people I really look forward to seeing every year. Maybe.
Every summer I attend two conferences. One of them is almost always the big Ecological Society of America (ESA) annual meeting. The other depends on my whims. I have a love/hate relationship with conferences that revolves around my love of seeing people I know and hearing about their research and my hate of meeting new people and being forced to figure out what I should be saying to someone I don't know.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, my husband and I were booking our travel for these meetings. We were feeling quite virtuous about this because the first meeting is not until July (we are not always this organized). With all the scares about fuel prices, we felt it wise to start early booking our travel. What started as a morning of excited virtuosity, ended with us angry, exasperated, frustrated and very very poor. We were shocked at the cost of air travel. Last year, we flew to Europe. For the same cost this year we can fly to....Milwaukee.
The goal of this piece is not to just complain about the cost of airfare (though venting about it does make me feel a little better). The cost of these meetings overall had also gone up: registration was higher, hotels were higher. At one point, we were so concerned at the costs that my husband (who has requested that I refer to him as General Disarray - a subject perhaps for another entry) and I briefly contemplated not going to at least one meeting. We didn't cancel, but we did start wondering what effect the cost of travel might have on the attendance at scientific meetings. We decided that there was a good chance that meetings might be smaller this year. If we didn't have pressing reasons to go this year, I think we would have forgone one of the two meetings. More importantly, we thought there might particularly be a strong impact on students.
When I was a student, I could go to the annual ESA meeting for about $200-400. This year, I am sending one of my students to ESA and just getting her to ESA (minus registration and housing) is going to cost that much (a fact I didn't realize when I made the offer). I am a strong believer that students should attend national meetings. It's a critical part of their education as a scientist. Not only does it allow them to hear what the latest research questions and results are, but allows them to meet and talk ideas with people they would never meet otherwise. However, what happens when sending a student to a meeting starts to cost 500-1000 dollars? Where does that money come from?
Now, part of the increase in cost is because students fly to meetings now. When I was a student, we'd often pile into a car, split gas money (also not an insignificant cost these days, but cheaper than flying), and pile 5-6 people into a hotel room. I have seen no sign that students at this institution or my previous institution do that. They seem to either fly, or they don't go. In some ways I am very nostalgic about the days of the long road trips to get to conferences. There was always this air of adventure and sacrifice for something important. I suspect, if prices continue to climb, that many of today's graduate students are going to be able to share in my nostalgia.
