Scientific Conferences: When a bunch of nerds get together, pretend we're not all painfully introverted, and submit ourselves to the mortifying ordeal of being known. Somehow, this is what we decided is the best way to network.
And that we didn't just go for the food. That's always the hard part where the posters are all near the food and everyone has to pretend they aren't just going for the food.
We are at this conference for the supplier booth freebies and competitions. Thirty years ago, as a post-grad, I attended my first conference. I was at the time in disgrace, having recently almost destroyed a chromatography column with my mixture of protein, enthusiasm and ignorance. A manufacturer that supplied HPLC and PAGE reagents was running a chromatography limerick contest. The prize was a brand new latest model size exclusion column. I won with my entry, a versical celebration of my glorious failure: A careless young graduate student Did a thing that was highly imprudent: Adding crude protein mix To the Superose 6, She rendered the column occludent. I was redeemed in the eyes of my supervisor, and I've been addicted to supplier freebies and competitions ever since.
I can't believe they actually gave goodies away for a limerick. All these interesting stories, yet none of them ever seem to happen when I look for them!
As always gets to the key point: "I am just here for the free trip." The only reason we did posters was because I needed it as an excuse for the free trip.
Irony; I run a print shop and my primary customers are scientists going to poster sessions... and... there are so many problems with academic posters, it'd be funny if it weren't so horrible...and it's only exacerbated by the fact that the scientists have pretty much dug in their heels on wanting to change how they do posters (there are some folks that are moving towards better designs, but they're in the minority). ...also, that whole "I left my poster on the plane" issue can be eliminated if your poster was printed on fabric; can fold it up and take it with you on a carry-on bag.
I was flying to a conference with some ppl in my lab and one of my lab mates and I saw someone make his entire poster on the plane ride to the conference. It was amazing
I FEEL THIS IN MY *SOUL!* Bro, I get voluntold by my clinical director every other year for a large national conference, even when we don't have any new data... just so our department can look good. At that point, I scrap and MacGyver stuff together to BS my way through, hoping no one asks any questions, and proceed to enjoy the free trip otherwise.
Why is this so accurate. I remember by honors poster session when one of the countries top scientists in the field I was studying came up to read my poster and talk with me. I was so nervous I mispronounced half the terms in my study, made a real... Great impression.... 💀
As an artist who has done art vending before, the "I thought we made eye contact" really hits very different professions, who knew there would a similar experience like this
One of my colleagues used the same poster for 3 years in conferences! Nobody read the whole poster (even her supervisor), so she just changed the title with a marker every time and saved a lot of money and work.
The free trip is one of the best perks! I love getting a week's vacation paid for almost entirely by my company for our continuing education conferences.
The editor-in-chief of our journal used to ask me to go grill the people at the poster sessions, so they’d be more confident when the judges came by. Accidentally made me popular with the grad students and their advisors. 😂 I miss those science nerds!
OMG!!! Nailed it all, per your usual stellar work! No longer in academia but standing in front of the poster and the “let me know if you have any questions” and trying to judge whether people are really looking or politely looking. Sometimes though, there are some sessions that are really fun bc you get some really good conversations-they are just there to keep you trying new poster sessions.
Hey I just wanted to share this because my eye doc got a good laugh. So my doc prescribed me Lotemax drops but CVS gave me both the drops and the gel and told me I shouldn't take them both for risk of Mesothelioma. I am now my eye docs favorite story.
A researcher that states up front how small the study was, that it didn't involve clinical experimentation and that it might not have even produced a statistically significant result!? That's rarer than an honest politician.
Good god I went through the poster session charade when I was in grad school. You're only there because your boss forces you to be there and you have to put up a show for the absolute weirdos who genuinely have nothing better to do with their Friday evening than pretend to care about the grunt research you're doing at minimum wage so that corporations don't have to pay their science.
Oh my goodness …I got knots in my stomach as soon as I saw the title and then watching the video the “ anxiety “ only increased . And I’ve been retired close to 18 years 🤣🤣🤣🤣❤️
I asked a question once at a poster presentation. Legend has it part of my soul is still bound to an unending explanation of quantum-level influences on avian magnetoreception for navigation. (I jest...tbh what I did manage to understand of it was actually was fascinating af. But still...the sudden spark of wild-eyed excitement in the eye of the presenter when I asked about his research was just a little bit terrifying 🤣)
I would love to go ask questions at these but they are not advertised! My son's robotics club gad sonething similar with different teams of students. No one asked the programers any questions until I raised my gand. I asked them, "You seem impressively well versed in this coding language. What are you doing, to protect your families from all this?" They were very confused so I explained that, "My college roommates were engineers who took coding classes. I was an arts major. One night one of them woke me up because she had a terrible nightmare and needed to talk to someone. Afterwards she went back to sleep but I was too afraid to sleep. Her bad dream was not the issue for me but because she had not been speaking like a regular person but had been speaking to me in C++ and the most absolutely terrifying thing was that I had understood her. So I want to know what your plan is to protect your loved ones from this type of exposure?" They of course laughed but I dead-panned a, "I'm serious, HER C++ nightmare has given me an ICK for well over 20 years!" And then I would just giggle. They did seem to appreciate at least having a single question to answer. My son said it was the only question they got for the entire day (besides asking, "What does JAVA mean?"
Yeah, I hate those old-school poster sessions. You have nothing to sell, it's just a part of the real research that is not that interesting, but by the next conference, you will be arm deep into work and have no time and the location was really nice, too. And there will always be some lazy case report of an absolutely spectacular case of someone falling from an airplane, being shredded by trees, impaled by a fence post, nibbled on by wildlife, found 36 hours later, declared dead, waking up in the morgue and miraculously surviving it all with no internal organ damage and a full recovery. Nobody will look at your poster worth 5 years of research, a broken relationship and several enslaved students. It's been your life the last years, you can't even remember what your family looks like (or if you ever had one), but at that moment you just want to be the lucky guy in the ER when that airplane guy came in. 30min work and everyone will be talking about that case for years. I appreciate the new poster sessions where you get 3min to present your work and people can come to you with questions later. No awkward waiting at your poster for nothing.
@@macmedic892 Am I a big meanie if I am an exuberant survey responder? Sometimes the way they construct a survey makes me rage! Example: a Phone Survey wants a ten point scale (for some demonic reason a four or five point scale is no longer good enough). Instead of making zero lowest and nine the highest, they design it as 1 is the lowest and 10 is tge highest and then if you enter either a "1" or a "10" there is an additional survey question to solve confusion their process created!
Used to love printing out all the large format posters for the science students when I worked at my college's media lab. That was the fun part. Poor things had to go present later lol
No, no, my research coordinator who collected the data, helped organize and perform the analysis, helped design the poster to the randomly minute differences between conferences, is an author on the abstract, was also paid by a study sponsor to attend Specialty Week, and is slowly dying inside as they prowl the poster session like a shark watching me right now couldn't stand here in my stead because... well... what if our department chief strolls by?
Just had my first conference poster session today as a resident! Super fun trying to explain why our QI project to improve pneumococcal vaccination rates actually caused....lower vaccination rates 🤦
I flew one of my registrars from Aus to the US for a poster that got accepted by the ASA, lets say I didn’t quite understand that they would get to talk about it in front of 4 people… but I’m pretty sure they enjoyed the free trip!
OMG... this brings me back to nursing school clinical quality control project presentations. "Why are we doing this?" Of course, nobody showed up to watch. 🤣 I haven't done a quality control project in 10 years of nursing. Who the heck has time for that!!!
As someone who's parents are doctors and researchers, I can't remember how many times I've seen them do the weird hand shifting for hours and just wondered how am I related to these people.
I did a poster session once as a research assistant for anaesthesia. However, when the day came around, my boss who was going to be there to back me up came down with something that completely knocked him on his ass, so I had to fly that one solo. On the other hand, I got his drink tickets to the afterparty.
Been there too many times. Further Education Colleges UK. There was also a propensity in presentation to be asked by the presentor to get into groups for 3 or 4 and discuss ideas before one had any idea of the item being presented other than the topic. The group would after 15 minutes presented their ideas. I excused myself and of the loo for 15 minutes and then returned! The conclusion was that the presenter had no idea either and was gleaning ideas from the attendees to be used in his next presentation!!
Ah, another 'just going to the loo' presentation avoider! Access course, FE college, UK. I swear the course leaders came up with the most obscure topics possible 😂
Just in time for the ophthalmology research conference, ARVO. Up in Seattle this year, apparently they didn't make enough pins as my colleagues aren't able to find any. Why go if not for the pins?
I am not in the medical field, but I have been in an event presenting my poster before. I feel all the akwardness in my soul. At least I didn't forget mine in the plane XD
I just had grad school war flashbacks. My PI seriously tried getting a poster submitted - in plant genomics - by extrapolating results from a sample of.... one.
Still can’t get over it. Another country, another hemisphere even….and the culture is EXACTLY the same. Even bigger than that…Dr G’s Wide World of Medicine is the same as when I first started as a clinical medical student …….in 1979! Poster sessions always struck as the punishment you got for not being asked to speak…but still having to attend conference .
Two tips: 1) When people actually pause while strolling by your poster and start reading it, say "Would you like me to walk you through my poster?" 2) When you start to have control over your research career, don't go to a conference unless you have meaningful data to talk about.
As a masters prepared RN, I just could not go back to get my PhD in nursing because it would involve doing research. And THAT meant taking an advanced statistics course. And THAT is my most dreaded course. So screw it. I stopped at masters.
I always got at least one 'I have beef with your professor, and I will pick a fight with you/try to make you look/feel stupid.' Days where no one, or only other grad students talked to me were a win lol
