The Wedding Season
Adam Peel, PhD Student based at the University of East Anglia
Conferences can be scary places for a new PhD student, particularly the first one – everybody seems to know everybody else; it’s like walking into a wedding reception and realising that you don’t know anyone other than the bride & groom. In this – soon to become very laboured – metaphor, the PhD supervisor is the bride/groom and attaching yourself, limpet-like, to their side is simply not an option. They know everyone and have to try and get around as many of those people as possible (moreover a student addendum would almost certainly cramp their style for the first dance). Unlike a wedding there is no one pressing a bucks-fizz into your hand to facilitate the flow of conversation and no carefully considered seating arrangement (although - on the plus side - forced participation in The Macarena is also absent). As the wedding season progresses you do, however, find yourself getting the hang of things. You start to see some of the same faces again; you find yourself speaking to more and more guests, discovering those with common interests; and you are no longer stuck feigning interest in a flower arrangement while hoping to see someone you know.
This week I had the pleasure of attending another conference and one I was very much looking forward to - the 2017 Joint Centre Meeting bringing together the Asthma UK Centre for Applied Research (AUKCAR) and the MRC-Asthma UK Centre in Allergic Mechanisms of Asthma.
I am the only AUKCAR student at my university and so it is a real treat to be surrounded by other asthma researchers for 2 days. I always come away from such events encouraged and inspired. It was lovely to hear from fellow AUKCAR PhD students on the progress of their research and impressive to see how well they presented; even more encouraging for me were the revelations afterwards of how nervous they had been or of the difficulties they had overcome to achieve their results (this gives me hope!). Many of the presentations from the MRC-Asthma UK Centre students were simply jaw dropping – ‘proper’ science stuff! I had to do a bit of sneaky googling to keep up and most definitely need to brush up on my genomics to get the most out of such events in the future.
In-between the presentation of research material from the two centres were key note speeches from some legends in the field; the cumulative experience in the room must have numbered in the many hundreds of years. Poster sessions during the break gave me the opportunity to chat to people about my research, tap into some of that expertise and get some really useful feedback on a planned study (with just enough time remaining to tweak my proposal before it is submitted).
A boat trip down the Thames is not typically part of a conference programme but allowed discussions to continue in a more informal (and really quite beautiful) setting. I think it would be stretching it a bit to suggest that the conversations were all research-based but the opportunity to socialise with colleagues in such a way really helps foster new relationships, breaking down barriers to future communication. The night was completed with my now customary hotel mishap. In contrast to recent experiences I managed to find the hotel easily enough and they even had a reservation for me. It was just unfortunate that the room to which I was given a key was already occupied; a fact I only became aware of as a confused and alarmed form rocketed from the bed. Apologies to the unknown sleeper and here’s hoping the next meeting is just as productive, welcoming and inspiring.
