Abstracts for the unmissable* Society for Neuroscience annual meeting are due today.
So we're getting excited for the upcoming meeting, right? Should we get our plane tickets? Reserve a room? Oh wait, the meeting starts November 13th.
Today is May 13th. I did a quick count, using toes for the extra two months, and this means that the meeting is six months away.
Because the number of attendees at SfN is in the tens of thousands, I thought that the delay between abstract submission and meeting actually occurring was somewhat forgivable back in the days of 5-and-a-quarter-inch floppy drives. Back when 64 MB was the size of a fancy new hard drive. Someone's got to program all those abstracts into thematically organized sessions, and make sure that the Big Shots in my subfield are scheduled to give their symposium talks at the exact same time as my poster so that I can never ever go to a symposium talk I actually care about. That doesn't just happen by itself, people.
But now? When Google can predict, before I finish typing, the rest of the last name of the ex-boyfriend I'm thinking about? When we can crowd-source an encyclopedia with useful entries on "Factors affecting the crack spread"? [I clicked on the "random" button, I swear.] Does it honest to God still take six months to sort 20,000 abstracts with preselected keywords into one of 8 themes and some number of subthemes/sessions?
Do they have a small staff of medieval scribes rewriting everything in calligraphy, or what?
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* Because it's the only place you can see every single neuroscientist, living or dead, you have ever known. As a meeting, it makes you want to drink hemlock by Day Two.
15 years ago
14 comments:
I tell people that going to SfN is (in magnitude) like going to a Penn State football game except everyone in the stands is a neuroscientist, or trying to sell something to a neuroscientist.
Now that everyone has e-mail and journals are electronic and there are a bajillion subfield-specific small meetings where you can actually have a real conversation with another scientist, meetings of the size and scale of SfN have become essentially worthless. They have some value for the huge swinging dicks at the highest levels and for the smallest grad student and early-postdoc cogs at the lowest levels, but for anyone in between it is a complete waste of time and money, and it's not even fun.
CPP is insane. You can have great conversations with scientists at SFN. The key to understanding SFN is to recognize that SFN is not one meeting, it is a city of many meetings.
Going to SFN once allows me to avoid going to 20 other meetings. It is the only meeting where I can spend the morning meeting with all the people who work on project A and the afternoon with all the people who work on project B. Since I have between three and four ongoing projects, each of which crosses at least two and sometimes four or five areas, if I went to all the meetings I would need to in order to meet and talk to all the people I need to, I would never be in the lab or home.
SFN is glorious. You have to admit that you're not going to see everything, and that the posters are only an excuse to talk to the other scientists, but that's what meetings are about anyway. I get more done at SFN than at all of the other meetings I go to combined. (Note: I still also love small meetings too, but they're not SFN.) Everyone at SFN makes their own meeting out of the wondrous chaos.
CPP dude, you just called us "cogs"? EXPECT DISGRUNTLEDOC WRATHINESS.
I think SfN would be a better meeting if the abstracts weren't due until 1-2 months in advance, so people's posters bore some relation to their data, and/or were not already published. Other than that, I only like it if it's in a walkable city with good food (DC!).
I occasionally feel like CPP; but usually not. SfN has a real value simply because everyone else is there - friends from grad school, colleagues working on similar stuff now, potential mentors for graduating students - and also because I can go find out about stuff that I would never go to a meeting on.
Plus, these days I do think that there's some value to my students of having me there.
@PUI: You a Nittany Lion too?!
I agree with CPP...Big dicks get more notice, students wander in slack jawed amazement and the rest of it is a waste of time. However, for change I finished my abstract in record time this year. I intend to spend a week in San Diego getting drunk and having fun on the company check.
SfN is a massive, headache inducing time sink. And I still go every fucking year...
Bitch all you want folks, just be grateful that you have the budget to go and the lab power to create the data to present every year!
:)
I'd love to look at the outside of the Hotel Del Mar from the Motel 6 across the street where I'm staying. I'd love to stand behind 6 rows of people to see only the top panels of a particularly interesting poster. I'd love to sit miles away from a stadium- sized screen which projects the image of a tiny-on-stage "famous" scientist. And NOW most of all, I'd like to go to a meeting where they have a sizable Education and History poster session.
Yep, bitch all you want...
I agree about the excessive abstract to meeting time. On the other hand I can hear more data about more topics in two days of SfN than I could with the equivalent time in the library. And the library isn't near the beach.
@tideliar: Doesn't EVERYONE know about the size of Penn State football games? :)
SfN is glorious. That about sums it up, qaz.
I agree that the action is on the poster floor. I find the oral sessions to be of decreasing value the older I get. People's "face" presentation is of next to zero value compared to talking face to face about all the crap that went "wrong" in the past year or so.
I've learned that SfN can be excellent, but you need to pace yourself, and be sure to maintain a healthy 30/70 science:social ratio ("social" includes sciency conversations w/ peeps, BTW) or you'll want to rip your eyes out from reading too many posters. I love seeing my friends from grad school and from smaller meetings. And I usually manage to have at least a handful of really great at-poster conversations, which for me is what makes completley worth it.
The thing I find strangest about SFN is that when I go, it seems like the most important meeting in the world, but when I skip it, I don't miss it.
Especially not the bit about submitting abstracts six months in advance.
Recently submitted an abstract for a meeting that is 6.5 months away. Guess what, only half of the research is done. Retarded. The networking at this meeting is far more important than any of the science, so hopefully that won't matter.
I still go to SFN, but i barely make it to the meeting. It's mainly for meeting with friends, hitting social events, drinking, ordering room service, etc. I walk through the posters and usually dont give two shits about what I see. This year will be my 21st SFN. Soon I will have gone to more SFNs on annual basis than the years prior to my being the neuro field (I am 44 now....)
Hell no, I don't go. Completely agree with CPP. 'Tis a jamboree get-together for the locals, but the science is spread too thin for this foreigner to make the effort. Done it twice, which was once too much.
As one of my colleagues remarked, if you don't go to SFN you miss 100% of the meeting. If you do go you miss 99.95% of the meeting...
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