This is the final part of my series documenting my time at the Developmental Biology of Sea Urchins conference in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Previous entries: Introduction, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
All we have to do now is wait for our shuttle back to the airport. Around me there are all sorts of scientists who look just how I feel: Tired and ready to go home for some relaxation, but also anxious and ready to get back into the lab and work on some of the ideas that they got from the conference. A number of them also look like they have hangovers that could slay the most alcohol-tolerant of English dockworkers. So, you know, a pretty successful week, overall. I had a great time at the conference. It was very interesting, but also quite a bit of work for me. Even after two years of working on this system, there is just so much more to know about how sea urchins grow and develop. It can be a bit overwhelming, but I know that if other people here can understand it, then in the future I can too. I hope that next time I have a talk to give, because it really seems like talking to these people about my work would be extremely exciting and rewarding.
Previous entries: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
On Saturday night, there’s a poster session and mixer. Over the last two days, many perfectly polished posters were pushpinned into place. In other, less alliterative words, right now there’s a room full of posters waiting to be discussed. It kind of feels like a locker room, with all of the posters playing the part of a team getting ready for their moment to shine.
This is part 2 of my experiences at the Developmental Biology of Sea Urchins conference. Part 1 can be found here.
A quick update, because the first talks start in 20 minutes. The food here is merely “edible,” meaning it’s better than your standard cafeteria, but actually putting effort into the food would simply be too much work because there are over 100 people eating at each meal. One thing about the meals is that they are much more casual than the actual talks, so people are much freer to discuss which aspects of their projects are frustrating, annoying, or confusing. I bet that about 70% of the actual science that’s done at these conferences is done over a burger and beer (although, since WHOI is in Massachusetts, it’s more likely to be a bowl of chowder and a Sam Adams). One observation I made is that the people here (especially the professors) seem to enjoy wine. A lot. Most meals resulted in enough bottles of wine being emptied that there’s probably a vineyard or two near Wooster that’s scrambling to replenish their inventory. Either way, there’s a lot of interesting discussion happening over meals that are really useful to doing science. The talks and posters are for telling everyone what you’ve done, but the meals are for talking about what you’re going to do.
This is the first article in a series about my experience at the Developmental Biology of Sea Urchins conference in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. For an introduction, click here.
Because it was the cheapest flight, my plane from Pittsburgh to Boston leaves at 8:45 AM today. Because I’m an anxious guy who assumes that everything at the airport will take as long as possible, I had to wake up at 5:30 AM, to carpool to the airport at 6:00 AM, so I can get through security by 8 AM, so I can get some breakfast before boarding at 8:30 AM. It would have been more expensive, but I would have had a lot more fun driving to New York or Philadelphia on Tuesday, staying the night in a hotel, then finishing the trip Wednesday. But I’m paying for the trip with a grant, so I have to do the trip on the cheap. I hate air travel. I get awful motion sickness from both takeoff and landing, so I spend the entire lead-up to takeoff anxious about getting sick, then I spend the whole flight anxious about getting sick when we land. That’s why I avoid planes whenever possible. I don’t get too sick from cars, trains, or even boats – it’s just airplanes that have my number. I think it’s because my body is wholly aware that humans were never meant to enter parabolic trajectories above an altitude of about two feet.
Prologue – Why is there a conference about sea urchins?
This year I went to my first multi-day conference as a graduate student, the Developmental Biology of Sea Urchins conference at the Marine Biology Laboratory, located in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. I was a little nervous, because I didn’t feel like I knew all that much about the field, and also because I had no idea how it was possible to spend four days talking about sea urchins. Then I realized that every researcher will have to attend their first conference at some point, so I decided to write about the experience for all of you who want to know what happens when you get 100 scientists together who all work on the same problems.