Goldschmidt Conference

So, let's play a game: Where's Meghan This Week? If you guessed Sacramento, California, for the Goldschmidt conference, you are correct! And there is no prize. Sorry.

It has been a long week here. Conferences are always surprisingly exhausting. Goldschmidt is a geochemistry conference that happens once a year. The conference location moves to a different world city each year. For example, next year the conference will be in Prague. For those of you who are non-scientists, conferences are an important way that scientists communicate with one another and network. Generally, anyone attends that has interesting results to present--i.e., an interesting scientific story to tell the community--as well as the money to go. For several days we attend talks and poster sessions given by our colleagues. The talks are usually short: 12 minutes plus about 3 minutes for questions from the audience. It is actually not much time to convey complex results and ideas. Poster sessions run for several hours and posters usually have more give and take in communication, as absolutely random people stop by and ask you to explain your science. Personally I enjoy the poster sessions more for being able to exchange ideas with my colleagues and to get feedback on what I am presenting. However, for this post I have no pictures because I was swamped for nearly three hours at my poster before I became mostly hoarse. For both posters and talks, people often present very new results, and part of the process is critically thinking through those results with the community. Also, both posters and talks require a person to develop good communication skills, which are honestly only acquired through practice.

I think one of my big revelations at this conference was that conferences are about people. They are a great time to catch up with old friends and there has been a fair amount of evening revelry. And beer--we are talking about geologists, after all. Conferences also are a chance to meet up with current collaborators and to find new collaborators. None of us is an expert in everything, and part of science is finding good people to work with that have complementary expertise. I got contact information for several people that I had never met before that are doing interesting work, and I am truly excited to get in contact with them in the next few weeks. I think this conference has reinvigorated my desire to do research--there are so many exciting possibilities out there!

I also got the chance to attend a variety of professional development-type workshops. Today's was about science communication, a topic that I find myself increasingly drawn toward. Lately I have been thinking a lot about how to balance conveying information in a way that accurately represents the science, but is concise and clear. One phrase that was used at the workshop was "simple, but not simplistic." How do you balance the interests of the scientist and the listener/reader? Any thoughts from out there in internet-land? What makes for good scientific communication? What works for you?