Starting Grad School: A guide to your first conference. Part 2

Last week I was at a huge international conference in San Diego, presenting a poster and learning about cool science. I figured it was only charitable to impart my conference-gained knowledge, and seeing as I can’t talk about lots of the science (sharing other people’s unpublished data is Not The Done Thing) it’ll have to be touchy-feely knowledge instead.

Earlier I wrote about being prepared for conferences, but today I’m going to talk about how you behave at a conference.

Don’t be a dick

Okay, so that may sound pretty easy. But apparently it’s not. Because in the space of a week at PAG, I encountered some truly dickish behaviour. 

Starting Grad School: A guide to your first conference. Part 1

I just (well, a few days ago, but: jetlag) came back from a massive international conference, and am feeling like it’s high time I shared some more advice for the first year Grad students. I could write you a couple of thousand words about attending conferences but, let’s me honest, nobody would read them. So for now I will just impart advice about two conference-attending topics:

• Be prepared for anything
• Don’t be a dick

I guess I should probably put a bit more meat on those bones, so here’s part one: How to be prepared for anything

I’m still here!

Sorry for the radio silence, folks. I’m currently at PAG XXI. (That’s the 21st annual Plant and Animal Genome conference for those of you out of the loop). Long, long days (Workshops from 8am-6pm), a poster to worry about (no, I don’t know why a poster is making me nervous when I really should have been trying to give a talk) and jet lag into the bargain. Still, I might get a blogpost up before the week is out, and if not there will be one coming pretty much as soon as I’m back in the UK. (I have Friday off work since I’ll be too jetlagged for the lab, landing at 7am!) For a geneticist, at a genomics conference, I seem to be doing an awful lot of sociology…

Anyhow, bits and bobs still going up on Twitter, if you wondered whether I was still alive (or wanted to know more about QTL mapping, de novo assemblies and meiotic crossovers!)

The Ramen Diaries, Part 5: Where I throw a tantrum

When I was in my teens, the thing that I loved more about science was the opportunity to learn something new every day. I loved that what I thought I knew was never exactly true, and hated it at the same time. I wanted to know what we’d be told in our GCSE classes, or our A-level classes, or our undergraduate lectures long before I was old enough for it to be on the syllabus. I had this idea that if I kept studying science for long enough, eventually it would make sense.

It will never make sense.