(no subject)

[chhotii]

Note to self: Poster sessions are the absolute best part of the conference! First off, the constraint on the presenters, that they have to fit all the information about their study into the size of a poster, enforces a lot of focus on them. Secondly, the constraint that you as the viewer have, that you have to triage what posters out of hundreds to look at within a short time, enforces a lot of focus. Thus, I don't get bogged down in a room of posters, as I do with a pile of journals... Third, you see all kinds of crazy things that don't make it into the journals: null findings, unexplainable findings, etc. It's all the result of everybody's grad students' efforts, rather unfiltered, whether it worked or not. Maybe the process of science should be more about the posters, less about the journal articles, because there sure is a lot of publication bias out there. Best thing of all: you get to talk to everybody. Well, nearly everybody (some people don't show up to stand next to their poster when they are supposed to). Best conversation opportunity of the year. So much more efficient to ask all the "what do you mean by this?" and "why did you do it that way?" questions in person than to try to puzzle out the answers to these questions from the publication.

Comments

[happyfunpaul.livejournal.com]

For me, poster sessions were sort of feast-or-famine, emotionally and intellectually. When they worked, they went exactly as you said. (The best way for this to happen was to be a presenter oneself!) But other times I felt withdrawn from the whole experience. One particularly bad time, I felt overstimulated by the crowds yet underwhelmed by the information itself, so I retreated to a corner. (This was pretty easy because the poster session was in a large room, so rather than being packed wall-to-wall there was a large perimeter I could retreat to.) For a while I just looked from a distance at the whole proceedings, felt utterly disconnected from the whole experience, and started laughing at the ridiculousness of the whole game.

In retrospect, that was probably (1) the end of my career as an academic and (2) a sign I had clinical depression, but I didn't consciously realize either until years later.

(Uh... this reply was more depressing that I intended it to be. Most of the time, poster sessions were really cool, and your observations are spot-on!)