Prelude to SfN2014

Well, I’m getting ready for my trip to DC for the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting.

Over 30,000 neuroscientists will be descending upon the Washington DC starting this Saturday, November 15th.

And the frenzy has already begun! I sent the pdf of my poster to be printed yesterday, hopefully no hiccups and will get it back today. But that reminded me of the times as a grad student, all the time fretting about typos and each panel lining up correctly. Going back and forth and back and forth with my adviser about just the right way to word something, or just the right image to use, the best colors for the graphs, etc. It was surely a headache back then. Each poster took weeks of editing before we settled on “good enough” at the last minute to possibly print before our flights to the conference.

But ultimately I think it was good training. I can now make a poster in my sleep, well almost. I still fret about lining everything up just right and checking for small errors. But it is definitely easier and I really think it’s made me a better presenter. So thanks for the awesome guidance Ed!

The other part about preparing for SfN is meeting up with old friends. We’ve all gone our separate ways since grad school, some to academic positions, some into industry. But through emails, facebook posts/messages and texting we will all try to meet again to catch up. Our department’s SfN tradition (courtesy of the Powley Lab) was always Indian dinner. We’d find a great Indian restaurant and share plates and catch up. Hopefully we can make that happen again. We may also try to hit up the Science Club, because seriously, of course we will.

The new piece to this SfN experience for me will be the role of science blogger. As an official live SfN blogger I will be attending talks, events and posters and writing a blog post every day of the meeting. It sounds both exciting and daunting. Hopefully I can make it work.

I’ll also be posting here, where you can find other SfN bloggers.

See you in DC!