My experience attending a large conference.

During my PhD I traveled from New Zealand to Boston USA for an extremely large conference by SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) on Life Sciences. This was the largest conference I had ever attended and also happened to be my first. In addition to this it was also my first major overseas travel (excluding Australia) and I did it by myself.

Me at the conference! Solo traveling leads to terrible selfie game.

It is an extraordinary thing to travel by yourself. You only have yourself to blame if something goes wrong. I planned my trip myself (perfectly if I do say so myself) and carried a clearfile (clear, plastic, pocket book) with me which I put all documents guides, a couple of hardcopy maps, in order I thought I would need them. This was the biggest help and I never felt lost or unprepared. As my sister said:

"Trust the Engineer to plan her travel in a categorized clearfile"

..............

The conference was held at Westin Waterfront Hotel in Boston which, in addition to accommodation, the bottom 4 floors were large meeting/lecture/conference spaces all of which were full the entire time. In fact, the program for the conference was a 204 A4 page book telling you when and where each presentation was over the 4 day period.

The program textbook

Each 30 min block had around 15 presentation options you could choose from and attend at your choice. So before I attended I went through all the titles and identified things that were of interest, then to narrow my choice I read the abstracts. From there I gave each presentation a priority level. The reason for the priority level was I would undoubtedly be tired or jet lagged throughout the day and this way I could take breaks and not miss something important.

The Hotel and Conference Center

The Lectures and Presentations

The conference I attended was called Life Sciences. It was mathematical approaches to... well... life. It ranged everything from mathematical models of macroscale cells in the human body to analysed human data to mathematical models of plants feedback systems and many many more. What was fantastic was you could attend and understand almost any presentation because maths is the universal language.

The lecturers and presentations were broken up into four categories: Special Award Winning Plenary Lectures, Invited Lectures, Presentations and Posters.

Plenary Lectures

The Special Award Winning Plenary Lectures and Invited Lectures were held at non-conflicting times so that everyone could attend and in the largest rooms. They covered content that was really fascinating catered it to a scientific but non specific audience.

Plenary Lectures (Photo of only half the room!)

Some of my favorites included (note I didn't do this research and do not own it. Also I am paraphrasing based on memory and notes and may not be correct):

• Heart Valve Mechanics: a group of mechanical engineers, scientists and biologists had been working on creating a heart valve in a dish that they could eventually put into the human body but there was a lot of issues with this. First, the valve had to withstand a cyclic rhythm so they had to put it in a device and strengthen it before it could be used. Next, it the valve would stick closed. Under certain conditions the valve (think like the plastic bit on the top of a squeeze sauce bottle that seals when no pressure is applied) would grow connections over time that would cease the opening. Finally, if that wasn't enough to deal with the human body, if it didn't reject it, would decide to overly accept it and grow its own cells in place of the valve but not the type of cells that would like to me.
• Circadian Rhythm: is the rhythm you fall into with your natural sleep cycles. Some maths guys collected a ton of data and built an app (you may have even heard of it) where you log your normal sleep patterns then when you want to go internationally travelling you enter the time zones and it helps minimizes the adjustment period by telling you the best time to go to sleep even before you step foot out the door.
• MRI: This was an award winning lecture and honestly it started with her handing out a puzzle at the beginning, similar to a sudoku, which I spent the entire lecture doing. You knew what had to go in the line but you only had information from the outside the line type thing. She described that is how an MRI worked. Her entire research was into making the processing of the data from an MRI quicker more accurate and more reliable to get better results.

Presentations and Posters

Presentations and Posters were aimed at the general scientific community and also included presentations that were more specific to the content you are researching. For the mathematical modelling community it was great to compare the maths you were doing and how people were applying it to different parts of the body or different animals entirely.

My Poster

I did a 'poster presentation' instead of doing a presentation for multiple reasons:

• You don't have to worry about presenting giving you more time to focus on the understanding other research
• You can direct anyone you talk to to your poster if they want to learn more
• At this conference, the posters were put up at the beginning of the conference in the break room and every time there was a tea or coffee break people would walk around the posters and chat casually.
• During the poster session you stand by your poster and you get people come over who are interested in your poster or have questions and comments.
• I often got comments after I introduced myself like "Oh, I was looking at your poster and ..."
• Finally, since I went at the beginning of my research it was easier to be more confident in your content of a poster than a half hour presentation.

Hope you enjoyed hearing about the conference I went to. If you like this, I might go into more detail on the best presentations (in my view). Stay tuned in for more adventurers of the Travelling Engineer!

Finally, thanks @vortac for the post suggestion.