Getting the most out of science conferences

I’ll be spending this week at the American Physical Society’s March meeting , which is being held this year in Dallas, Texas. The meeting is huge, not only in the number of attendees but also in the number of talks. Each day is divided into four three-hour time slots; each time slot contains 45 simultaneous sessions; and each session features 5–11 talks!

Even if I were still a researcher whose work was confined to one or two subfields, I’d have difficulty choosing which talks to attend and which to forgo. Now that I work for a physics magazine whose mission is to inform all kinds of physicists about all kinds of physics, the challenge of devising a personal March-meeting program is even greater.

What’s more, if, through writing a few stories about a particular topic—say, the various quantum Hall effects—I’ve become familiar with it, I should resist the temptation to attend sessions devoted to that topic. Rather, I should seek instead unfamiliar topics, which could prove to be just as interesting to me and to Physics Today‘s readers.

Having been to about half a dozen March APS meetings, I’ve devised a set of tips to help me get the most out of big science conferences. Although they’re more relevant to science journalists than to researchers, I list them here because you might find them helpful.

• Attend sessions made up of invited talks.

At least at the March APS meeting, invited-only sessions offer the best prospect of understanding, albeit partially, the science content of the talks. Invited talks tend to be longer, which gives the speakers the chance to properly introduce their topics to nonspecialists. Short, contributed talks, by contrast, have to jump right to the results, leaving nonspecialists in a state of puzzlement.

• Don’t spend all your time in talks.

Thanks to the arXiv preprint server, it’s possible to be au courantwith many fields of physics without leaving your lab, office, or home. When we go to meetings, it should be to meet people, as well as to learn about new work.

• Introduce yourself to people.

Accosting strangers can be daunting and isn’t perhaps a priority if you’re not a science journalist. But you can expand your network of acquaintances and potential collaborators by introducing yourself to what I call near strangers. These are people whose papers you’ve read and admired or who collaborate with your collaborators but not yet with you.

• Visit the exhibit hall.

Even if you’re a theorist who isn’t ever going to buy any of the spectrometers, lasers, cryostats, and other shiny new tools on display in the exhibit hall, you’ll find strolling through the hall’s aisles a worthwhile diversion. For one thing, people tend to visit the hall alone, which makes them easier to approach than if they’re outside a session, talking with their friends and collaborators.

If you have additional tips about getting the most out of big meetings, please leave a comment here. And if you see me at a meeting, please say hello!