NeuroDojo

Society for Neuroscience 2002, Part 3

Sunday, 3 November: SFN 1

The main event gets cracking on Sunday in the Orlando Convention Center, where the privilege of having a medium bottle of pop will only set you back... $2.50?!

The same sized bottles are 80 cents outside my office. The sad thing is, there are obviously people who pay that much, or those wouldn't still be there.

The thing that invariably impresses me about the Society for Neuroscience meeting is its sheer size. Non-biologists are always stunned when I tell them how many people come to this. They keep a running tally near one of the entranceways.

And remember, this is only a single branch of biology... (And students still don't think you can get a job in biology besides teaching and being a physician.)

I'm always forced to compare the main poster session room to an aircraft hangar, because I don't really know of any other building that has the same sort of proportions as these massive convention centers that the SFN meetings are held in.

There are scientific posters and vendors in this room all the way to the back. And the posters change twice a day. And there are presentations in tens of rooms outside of this one.

And yet, paradoxially, despite this meeting being so big (or perhaps because of it), you run into people you know very often. Because you simply can't even begin to hope to see even a fraction of the work on display, people are very focused about what papers they want to see. You begin to learn who's in your field of research because you keep seeing in front of the same posters you're interested in.

Note to new students in neuroscience: This is prime networking territory! Ask questions of the poster presenters, and strike up as many conversations around these posters as you can. These are the people who will be looking at your job applications and reviewing your grant proposals.