Help us deliver a memorable Fall Meeting experience for our first-time attendees. Share your tips for success and making the most of the meeting.
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Help us deliver a memorable Fall Meeting experience for our first-time attendees. Share your tips for success and making the most of the meeting.
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I have not checked in here for some time because I thought it was getting boring, but the last few posts are great quality so I guess I’ll add you back to my daily bloglist. You deserve it my friend
I have to disagree with Rich’s comment. “you’re not likely to run into people by accident…” I always have SO many people finding me just from spotting me down a poster aisle or on the street. But if you’re looking for someone specifically, leave a note on the message board for them, or, better yet, never be without your cell phone. Texting is unbelievably helpful for arranging to meet someone when you and he/she are not sitting in the same technical sessions.
Always make sure to have a sweater, jacket or other warm wrap with you. Some of the meeting rooms can be miserably cold. For the women, you can wear really fashionable shoes if you like, but it’s a good idea to tuck a little pair of ballerina flats in your purse or computer bag, especially if you plan to spend quality time at the posters.
If you are able to, register (or pick-up your badge if you pre-registered) on Sunday. The lines on Monday morning will be enormous.
For poster presenters:
In past years, they haven’t let us in to set stuff up ’til 7am, so unless you have to pick up your poster through the printing services, if you’re nervous and wake up early, you’re better off stopping for breakfast than going down too early.
Before you go, you’ll want to make sure that you know what your abstract number is … it’ll be of the form (section)(day)(time)(letter)-(number). Other than day, so you know what day you need to put your poster up, the only other part you need to worry about is the number after the dash, which is the poster board that you’ve been assigned. You’re supposed to put the abstract number on your poster, so if you have to, you can just unroll the poster and look. If you didn’t do that, you’ll need to grab one of the newspapers listing presentations for the day, or go to one of the public use computer terminals to look it up. There’s also a printed author index, but they changed things around last year, and I can’t remember if that’s in the daily newspapers, or the main program. Look for the first (presenting?) author, and the abstract# that’s in bold under their name (the ones not in bold they’re just a co-author on)
(note — the mobile app *does* *not* have presentations, only sessions, and the abstract central website isn’t designed for good access from mobile phones … but if you have a smart phone, in advance you can export your schedule from the abstract central site in calendar format, and load it into most phones)
Before you go straight to your poster slot, however, look for the booths set up with lots of cups set out … you want to grab one of the cups of pins, and the sheet to declare when you’ll be at your poster.
Once you’re at your poster slot, grab one of the push pins and shove it through the side of the cup, from the inside pointing out, and then use that pin to stick the cup onto the poster board (so you can still reach the pins while putting up your poster while keeping your hands free to put the poster up)
If you can, look for someone struggling to put up their poster, and give them a hand, then ask them to help you put up your poster, as it’s so much easier with two people.
If you’re stuck doing this by yourself, there’s an easy trick
1. Take your poster out of the tube, but do *not* unroll it.
2. If the poster is rolled so the printing is to the outside, unroll it, then re-roll it up the other way.
3. Move the cup of pins to the bottom of the poster board, towards the side that’s in the center of the roll.
4. Hold the tube upright so it’s not upside-down, against the poster board, and pin the top corner on the appropriate corner of the poster board (you want it as high as you can, and unless you’re good as estimating the size of your poster, just put it against the one side)
5. Unroll the poster along the board, then pin the other top corner (using the pins that are hopefully in easy reach; and don’t push too hard, as the whole stand will flex … firm pressure, and twist a little bit ’til it’s in, and it’ll go easier)
6. Smooth it out so it’s flat (possibly moving one of the top corners), and pin around the side.
(these assume that it’s rolled so there’s a ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ ends of the tube, rather than a ‘left’ and ‘right’ … it’ll work for those, but in step #2, you also need to make sure that the edge that’s on the outside is the top of the poster)
Using this technique, I was once able to get 10 posters put up (at a smaller conference, so I didn’t have as large of a poster hall to deal with) in under 30 minutes, including trying to figure out their numbering system and dealing with the posters not being pre-sorted in a useful way.
To decode the session identifiers, the format is :
(section)(day)(time)(letter)
This year, they’ve changed it around a bit, as poster sessions are now all morning or all afternoon, but still use ’1′ (which used to be 8am-10am) and ’3′ (1:40pm to 3:40pm)
So, as an example, IN54C would be Informatics (IN), Friday (day 5), late afternoon (4pm to 6pm) … the ‘C’ just means that there’s at least three informatics sessions in that time slot.
Westfield shopping mall at 865 Market St has a great food court downstairs. Next to the food court is Bristol Farms, a small food store with good fruit, produce, and take out salad and entree bar including lots of sushi.
Be prepared to bail out of the second morning session a few minutes early to head for lunch. If you don’t, all of the nearby restaraunts will be full, and you’ll have to wait or search out further away.
But Clara’s comment is the most important: comfortable shoes.
If you want to interact with people, hang out in the poster hall and talk to the presenters or your puzzled bystander if the presenter is not there. You can sometimes gain a lot more understanding by this than by attending a talk where it is rude to talk to your neighbour and the presenter disappears right after. Furthermore, you may find new friends.
Avoid conference burnout! AGU is huge, with tons of talks and posters to see, people to meet, and meetings to attend. Packing your day full of non-stop activities will most likely exhaust you. Don’t feel like you have to see every talk or poster, or have to run around all day every day!
Set aside some time to pause and reflect on what you’ve already seen. Appreciate some of the beauty of San Francisco – for instance, Yerba Buena Gardens is right across the street from the conference center, hidden behind the Metreon. Make time to have casual meetings with people. Finding an oasis of calm amongst the hustle and bustle of a conference is key to sustaining yourself for a week of geophysics!
* these instructions were actually sent out with every acceptance of talks for American Geophysical Union (AGU) meetings at least during the 1990s. Unfortunately, they stopped the practice. I’ve made very small edits to update the guidelines and think AGU should resume sending these instructions to speakers. We’ve all seen talks like the one described here.
Guidelines for Giving a Truly Terrible Talk*
Strict adherence to the following time-tested guidelines will ensure that both you and your work remain obscure and will guarantee an audience of minimum size at your next talk.
Slides
1) Use lots of slides. A rule of thumb is one for each 10 seconds of time allotted for your talk. If you don’t have enough, borrow the rest from the previous speaker, or cycle back and forth between your own slides.
2) Graphs with a dozen or so crossing lines, tables with at least 100 entries, and maps with 20 or 30 units are especially effective; but equations, particularly if they contain at least 15 terms and 20 variables, are almost as good. A high density of detailed and marginally relevant data usually preempts penetrating questions from the audience.
3) Use small print. Anyone who has not had the foresight to either sit in the front row or bring a set of binoculars is probably not smart enough to understand your talk anyway.
4) Use figures and tables directly from publications. They will help you accomplish goals 2 and 3 above, and minimize the amount of preparation for the talk. If you haven’t published the work, use illustrations from an old publication. Only a few people in the audience will notice anyway.
5) Make sure at least one slide has that big red X instead of the figure you meant to show. This relieves tension in the room.
Presentation
1) Don’t organize your talk in advance. It is usually best not even to think about it until your name has been announced by the session chair. Above all, don’t write the talk out, for it may fall into enemy hands.
2) Never, ever, rehearse, even briefly. Talks are best when they are given spontaneously with thoughts organized in a random fashion. Leave it as an exercise for the listener to assemble your thoughts properly and make some sense out of what you say.
3) Discuss each slide and viewgraph in complete detail, especially those parts irrelevant to the main points of your talk. If you suspect that there is anyone in the audience who is not asleep, return to a previous slide and discuss it again.
4) Face the projection screen, mumble, and talk as fast as possible, especially while making important points. An alternate strategy is to speak very slowly, leave every other sentence uncompleted, and punctuate each thought with “ahhh”, “uhhh”, or something equally informative.
5) Wave the light pointer around the room, or at least move the beam rapidly about the slide image in small circles. If this is done properly, it will make 50% of the people in the front three rows (and those with binoculars) sick.
6) Use up all your allotted time and at least half, if not all, of the next speaker’s. This avoids foolish and annoying questions and forces the chairman to ride herd on the following speakers. Remember, the rest of the speakers don’t have anything important to say anyway. If they had, they would have been assigned times earlier than yours.
If you’re giving a talk, don’t cram too much stuff in. Remember, a 15 minute slot is really a 12 minute talk. Don’t make it complicated. Simplify. Focus on one thing that you want the audience to remember when they walk away after the session, otherwise they probably won’t remember anything.
AGU will be a great networking opportunity. Meet people in your field of interest.
You’re not likely to run into people by accident. It happens, yes, but don’t count on it. If there’s someone you would like to meet, e-mail that person a week or two ahead of time, set up a time and place (pick something generic, like the registration desk, or plan on meeting initially at your/his/her poster), and exchange phone numbers.
If you are doing a poster, do ensure it is meaningful, else don’t try producing one at all.
If you are are doing a poster and you are not at your poster for the whole time, make sure you leave a note on your board telling people when you will be back, or how they can contact you.
If you are doing a poster, print miniature copies at A4 or A3 size as a simple way for people to take something with them as a reminder of your contribution. You can leave a supply of these at your poster for people to pick up if you are not at your poster all of the time. Make sure your contact details are clear and easy to see.
The Itinerary Planner is your best friend to plan out your schedule. Search the sessions, abstracts, keywords, etc to select the items of interest (from the 20,000 odd posters and oral contributions) and build up your personal program. You can save it, then log back in to make changes as many times as you like. You can print out each day’s list at the many terminals and printers available at the conference venue, and you can generate a PDF file that can be exported via email.
If you are doing a poster, print it at least a few cm (or inches) smaller than the quoted size of the boards so that it looks neater, and to avoid having the edges spill over onto the boards on either side.
The meeting rooms are large and very good eyesight is needed to see the screen from the back. Be there early or be prepared to stand by the wall to hear a very popular oral session.
1. Sometimes two or more potentially interesting sessions occur at the same time, and it can be hard to know in advance which will be good. Such sessions can even be located in different buildings. Team up with one of more colleagues and go to different sessions. Compare notes afterwards. If the session you chose turns out to be disappointing, contact your team mates to see if the alternatives are better.
Don’t forget to bring your umbrella and/or raincoat! It often rains in San Francisco during the meeting.
Wear your comfortable shoes! There’s a ton of walking between getting to sessions, the Poster Hall and finding fun places in the city.