My experience at the SVP meeting this month gave me a chance to think about the importance of such meetings, particularly for students. Perhaps this was driven by the realization that this year’s SVP was the first where I had no students with me – a far cry from the days when we would pile 5 or 6 of us in a hotel room. As I stood reading a poster or listening to a talk, I found myself thinking over and over ‘my students should be here’. Why is that? Aren’t meetings just about sitting around drinking, you might ask? Absolutely not. Not for serious scientists and students who hope to join them one day.
The exposure to colleagues and peers is a critical part of the scientific process. Your colleagues have new ideas and know of resources that are integral to the development of your projects. No matter how well researched your project is, someone always has something more for you, or a fresh look at the data, or sees a problem others have missed. I’ve never walked away from presenting a poster thinking ‘that was a waste of time’. Going to see the presentations of colleagues and peers is equally eye opening. While some are certainly better than others, if you go in with an open mind you are certain to learn something relevant. What you read in current journals is what was happening 2 or 3 years ago at best. What you see at meetings is what’s happening today. New discoveries are made, methods change rapidly, and the only way to stay abreast of the evolving field is by going to meetings.
And for students, being seen and making connections is absolutely essential. It’s how you form collaborative relationships, get invited to field projects, find advisors for your next degree, meet the people who will one day be hiring you, etc. What potential advisors want to see is that you have made the transition from student to professional researcher, and attending meetings is one of the best ways to demonstrate this to them. And you never know who will end up being the person who is evaluating your application to a PhD program, or reading your grant proposal, abstract, or article submission. You need to allow them to put faces to names, and meetings are a great way to do that.
While meetings do take time and money, they are a worthwhile investment. Money can almost always be found if you start asking early, particularly if you are presenting. By working with fellow students, being frugal and cost sharing, they become even more manageable. And, if you use your time wisely, you will seldom learn more in such a short time as when at a meeting. Plane ahead, prepare for the missed days, coordinate with professors, and you will find the days absent are not a problem.
I encourage you to take advantage of the numerous local meetings, like the upcoming TABA and the TAS meetings, but also be sure to get to a large international meeting at least once a year. If I hadn’t attended such meetings as a student I would never have gotten into the graduate programs I did, nor would I have been offered the fossils from the Koanaka Hills. That meeting encounter led to three field seasons, many presentations and papers, numerous collaborations, an NSF grant, and the material several of you are researching right now.
Lastly, meetings are a reality check of sorts. We have a tendency to see the students in the halls as our peers—the people we are competing against. This is absolutely not the case. The people who you will be competing against for graduate school spots, stipends and ultimately jobs, are not at Sam. They are at schools with names like UT, Princeton, Harvard, etc. Seeing the caliber of work these students are doing is truly inspiring for a professor, and hopefully motivating for a student.
So, let’s make this past SVP the last meeting I go to alone for a while!
