Analysis on Biggest Gathering

It has been a week after my conference attending. I have been meaning to post what I found from this annual biggest gathering and how I reflected upon myself for what scientific research is all about.

Floor plan

The convention center has 3 floors; each floor holding lecture sessions and obviously the ground floor has more sessions and packed with seemingly seasonal opening of coffee shop, food court, and shoe shiners in the last few days. Although each lecture room can accommodate at least 300 science enthusiasts, they are more likely filled with pockets of attendees who usually come with AACR program books and plan their next lecture visits in the lecture room. If you still don’t get it, here’s why: the lecture room is for next lecture planning room. Needless to say, some tech savvy well-suited guys or ladies come with their iPad and apparently enjoying touching or slashing the screen. I can’t say if they enjoyed the lecture though.

Lecture

I’d be belittling the conference if I say it brings nothing but the big shot. Regardless of whether the conference sparks scientific interest, I myself happened to ask what the purpose of conference is (rather than usual grandiloquent objective and potentially beneficial lectures by leading experts).  

Analysis

Did I get core element of the conference? Be it scientific interest, research theme, any inspiring speech, well-planned experiments?

The short answer is “NO”, followed by a long analysis of why:

For my level of fresh graduate, it is more like potential F1 driver driving in the streets of metropolitan area. He has a potential to become F1 driver someday. But in the streets of twists and turns, he can’t drive fast; the rules are different; the street is not track; he is not known; nobody gives a damn. Everything is totally different if he ever wonders how fast he would have driven and what else he could have learnt from the street vendors. 

I first start with Lecture. While it’s worth praising that every angle of research theme is available to attend during the day, I found most of the time the rooms were not well attended. The entire purpose of conference is to put some leading authors in the limelight and let them speak in front of those who would ever sit and enjoy seeing the leading author lips moving. That’s the first impression I got attending the lecture. Considering the availability of their works from internet, I found nothing more different than presentation from their published works. Who would else present their essential data before they get them published? As a grad student, could I approach those leading experts and ask their advice on my project? How many of audiences usually approach the speaker after the talk? The talk is more like “This is what we did, This is what we got, That’s why I presented that”. Asking questions and answering is more like each party threading on a battle ground with cautious motion. You will never get an answer “Yikes, you nailed me. We forgot to use that one too.” If you ever get such an answer, it will inevitably lower the speaker’s reputation and his/her spongy brains in the limelight, obviously in a bad way. So the entire presentation, asking questions, and answering events eventually become like a political play or a pre-defined show of “We’ve done that, We’ve found that.” The second impression I got from the lecture (not only from here the conference, but from others as well) was “Presentation or seminars are just a show” unless (1) it is a small group of like-minded scientists discussing deep into the core problem of the projects in hand or (2) the speakers provoke some idea or spark some interest. Other than that, it’s just a show where everybody goes if it would ever produce some excitement. In reality, 99% would never.    

I’m planning to write my musing on Impact Factor as well. And yes, it’s all about the Journals and perception.