Recently, I went to my second scientific conference,
the American Society of Human Genetics conference,
this year held in Vancouver.
I went to the same conference last year in Baltimore,
and it was incredibly stressful.
It was my first big scientific conference,
and I just felt like I had to go to everything
and I had to see everything.
And that is super overwhelming at a conference like this,
because there are sometimes six concurrent sessions.
There is no possible way to take everything in.
So this year, I tried to calm down a little bit
and only go to the things that I really wanted to go see,
and really observe them, and also film
a little bit of a travel blog.
This was my first time in Vancouver, which was beautiful.
And the conference was held at the conference center
right on the water.
So it was pretty easy to get distracted
by these surroundings.
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There are lots of different things happening all at once
at the conference.
There are talks.
There are poster presentations.
There's a giant exhibit hall where
vendors are trying to sell all of their different lab
supplies.
And I also met the robot that is one day going to replace me.
Just kidding.
Graduate students are way less expensive than robots.
No, I certainly couldn't film the talks or, actually,
any of the other posters.
People are presenting their work, often for the first time,
at this conference.
And so it would be very rude of me to then take a video of it
and put it up on the internet.
I can't bring you to the talks, but I promise you,
there were very, very many of them.
But I can show you my poster, which
I hung up on the first day and then presented a little later.
And I felt OK about it.
I actually had someone come up and ask
if the work was published, which made me feel really good.
Because, A, they thought that I could publish what I had,
and B, they wanted to read it if I did publish it.
So that was pretty exciting.
I set a conference goal this year for myself
to go up and ask a question after one of the talks.
Because there are often talks followed by Q&A sessions
where the moderators will ask for questions
from the audience.
And I always so admire the people who go up
and ask questions, because, A, I think that most of science
is learning how to ask good questions.
And so I'm always just impressed by them
that they've listened to this talk
and then thought up a cool question about it.
And B, because it's terrifying to have
to then walk up to the microphone in front of people
and ask your question.
Because what if it's actually a stupid question,
and everybody is going to laugh at you?
But I set this goal for myself this year, and I did it.
I went to a talk, and I had a question
in the middle of the talk.
And I told myself, this is it.
This is your moment.
You have a legitimate question that you want to ask.
You've got to go up there and do it.
And I did.
And it was terrifying, and I was literally shaking.
And I'm not often someone who gets nervous speaking
or at a microphone, clearly.
But I was so nervous that I actually
stumbled while I was asking the question.
And I think the speaker realized that I was nervous,
because I'm a crazy person.
But I did it, and I asked the question.
And then I sat back down, and I shook for a little while.
But I was just proud of myself that I made
myself go up there and do it.
Conference success.
Sometimes people joke about science conferences
being excuses for scientists to go to cool places.
And I think that, in some way, that is true.
I'd never been to Vancouver before.
I was excited to go.
But I think that, at least last year, I
was so nervous about the conference
and really having this feeling of anxiety over the fact
that I couldn't go to everything that I
didn't step back and enjoy it as much as I could.
And I think I did a little bit better job of that this year
of going to talks that I was interested in
and really absorbing the information a little bit
better, because I wasn't overwhelming myself.
And then, also, sometimes having a little bit of fun
after the sessions.
So conferences are a chance for scientists
from around the world to come together and share
their knowledge and share new ideas
and also be in the same place.
It's often a lot easier to talk to collaborators
or set up collaborations or share ideas when you're
wandering through the poster session, eating an ice cream,
and bump into somebody and just chat about their science.
That is a great thing that doesn't often
happen when we're all away, here in our labs,
not communicating with each other
as easily as if we're eating ice cream by a poster.
Before I went, I tried thinking about this conference
as an opportunity to step back from the day-to-day events
in lab and how all of my experiments are going,
to really remember why I love genetics
and to think about all of the different things
that people are doing in genetics.
Because I think it's so easy in lab to focus in really narrow
on just my project, that it's sometimes
easy to forget the scope of everything
that happens in genetics.
So I think I did a pretty good job of doing that
at this conference, of reminding myself
of all the other stuff that's out there,
and absorbing things that might be relevant and helpful
to my project, but also absorbing things that
are just cool about genetics.
I tried to go to a bunch of sessions
that didn't relate to me, but I thought were just cool.
I may not still have this whole conference thing figured out.
I still think I could be doing it a little better.
I could be getting a little bit more out of it.
But I think I did a better job this year.
And I'm looking forward to going to another one in three weeks.
Fall is all about science travel.
Let me know if you want to see more science travel vlogs
in the comments down below.
And hopefully, I will be able to continue doing them
as I continue going to more conferences
and talking about my science to more people.
Go forth, and do science in cool, new places.
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