Geek Overload
This past week I was at the Society for Neuroscience 2006 conference in Atlanta, Georgia. It's one of the biggest conferences in North America - this year there was around 30,000 Neuroscientists who attended.
That's a crap load of geeks in the same place at the same time.
The size of the conference is hard to explain unless you see it for yourself. I essentially spent the first day just walking around staring at things with my mouth agape. There was so much to do and see, so many talks and presentations and discussions and seminars and posters.
To give you an idea, here's a video I took of only one of the big poster presentation halls - there were a few this size.
I went to some talks by Nobel prize winners, I got to meet a lot of really important people in my field, and I even got a few offers for collaboration and one recruitment.
It was such an incredible experience - overwhelming and scary, but fascinating and exciting. Talking with all these really smart people and getting to see how much my research is on the cutting edge of neuroscience really made me re-evaluate wanting to stick with what I'm doing. Just last week I was sure I was going to leave the lab and do something else for my PhD, now I'm thinking of staying. It's funny how experiences like this can change us dramatically in just a few days.
Here's me with my poster on presentation day, woot! And don't worry if you don't even understand the title - I don't either!
posted by Joanna @ 2:39 PM
2 Comments
