| | I'm typing this from the Hyatt Regency hotel in San Antonio, where I'm attending a conference. It's one of those medical-type conferences, where people hang up their research posters, present the latest medical data, discuss the recent treatment breakthroughs, and get free pens from the pharmaceutical companies that have set up displays in the convention center.
I haven't been to many academic conferences before, so I don't have much by which to gauge this conference -- but it's huge! There are 8500 registered attendees, half of them coming internationally, filling up the entire convention center and staying in one of two dozen nearby hotels. I'm sure the major professional medical conferences (ACS, ACP, AAP) are bigger, but I am still impressed. I've seen people from literally all over the world: Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Peru, Britain, Germany, Japan, Italy, Korea...
I fall into the category of people hanging up research posters. There are about one thousand posters being displayed during the four-day conference. That's right: I'm one-in-a-thousand. The 4-by-7 foot posters are hung from oversized easels in a gigantic exhibit "room" (the sort of room that houses dozens of exotic cars when the auto show comes to town). I, fortunately, only have to stand awkwardly by my poster for two hours tomorrow evening, thus satisfying my obligatory duty to the conference for accepting my poster and abstract.
I've determined that the ability of a particular poster to attract a crowd seems inversely proportional to its distance from the tables of food that pepper the exhibit room. Large crowds holding fancy glasses of water and minature ham-and-cheese quiches walk thoughtfully by posters with titles such as "The Mapping of EGF-2bC Relationship to 5-THF Receptors" and "Phase II Multicenter Data from the RECEPTION Study."
(I totally made up those posters titles, but the reality is not far displaced.)
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| | Posted 12/14/2007 9:31 PM - 9 views - 1 comments
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