Nehaveigur

I’ve attended dozens of scientific conferences, from small meetings with 100 participants to enormous ones with 10,000. Locations include tucked-away venues like Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Wellcome Genome Campus and Asilomar, the terminal-sized conference centers of large cities like Los Angeles or Washington D.C., and university campuses, hotels and research facilities in North America and Europe.

If you’re not familiar with scientific conferences you may assume that their purpose is for researchers to get together to argue over competing hypotheses and the big decisions on the direction their field should take. This rarely happens. Almost always conferences are polite affairs. Rarely does anyone even raise their voice. Discussion is too formalized to result in real insights. The battling and deciding is done at smaller, unofficial meetings with fewer participants, and away from the organized sessions.

Neither are conferences the best way to learn about the latest developments. Reading research papers and following colleagues on social media are the superior strategy.

Instead, the best reason to attend conferences is to meet past, current and future collaborators.

People you know and have worked with before will be there. In the corridors, coffee lines and over meals and drinks you catch up with them. You look at photos of their kids and tell them what you have been up to. You benchmark your career against theirs, but try to keep it from being too competitive. There are people I’ve been in touch with for 20 years, only ever seeing them at conferences. They include former colleagues and even people I’ve been to graduate school with.

If you’re new to attending conferences, and if you’re lucky, you’ll be going with someone more experienced than you who will introduce you to some of their acquaintances. If you’re on your own, you’ll need to approach people, otherwise it’s a lonely experience. You have to take the initiative. There will be others like you, standing there by themselves with a glass of wine or coffee cup in their hands, looking lost. You introduce yourself, shake their hands, and ask them what they do. This being a scientific meeting, you’ll have the same interests and often know the same people.

I also recommend approaching those who have just given a presentation. Most conferences reserve time for questions after each presentation. This formal Q&A isn’t a good way to get to know the speaker. Better to wait until everyone else has asked their question and the session is over, then to walk to the front and introduce yourself.

It is those informal one-to-one and small group discussions between the official sessions that make conferences worth going to. It’s where you’re going to get honest opinions, where the criticism will be unvarnished, where people will offer truly interesting and new ideas, and where you will forge lasting bonds.