It’s New Year conference season! At the time of writing this blog I am currently attending the VMSG2022 conference hosted online by the University of Manchester. It therefore feels like the perfect time for me to write about my experiences with conferences and explain more about them.

What are Conferences?

Conferences are a major calendar event for many in academia. They are a time for us to get together, descending on a chosen city to present our latest research, networking with new faces and catching up with old ones over a few days.

For those presenting their research, there are two main ways: poster and oral. Posters are great ways for us to visually display a summary of our research on an A0-sized piece of paper – covering lit review, methodology, results and conclusions. Throughout the conference there are poster session time slots and coffee breaks, where you can stand next to your poster and talk to others about it, or visit other’s that caught your eye and learn more about them. Oral presentations come in two forms: flash talks and full talks. The flash talks are up to two minutes long, acting as a quick audio version of a poster, while the full talks are 10-minute long PowerPoint based presentations that are followed up with some questions from the audience. These longer presentations generally make up a bulk of the time spent at a conference.

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National & International

There are a tonne of different conferences across the globe. For the national ones in the UK that tend to be run annually by individual geology groups. Each specialises in their own aspect of geology. For example the Volcanic & Magmatic Study Group (VMSG) is a conference where (largely) volcanologists get together to present their volcanic research. There is also Palass for Palaeontology, MDSG for mineral deposits and plenty of other groups who have their own conferences.

International conferences come in the form of broad, all-inclusive geoscience (e.g. EGU and AGU), which often happen every year, or specialised (e.g. Cities on Volcanoes), which happen every other year. While being a little more pricey for entrance and travel fees, presenting your research at an international conference holds a little more prestige than a national one – not to say national conferences are not worth good points on a PhD application or CV.

Day One – Travelling & Ice Breaker

Many attendees tend to travel up to the event city the day before the conference begins. This ensures they can make it to the Introduction and starting talks on the first day. Depending on where you are in the world, some make their own way up, while more organised people group together and share a car.

Although this can be a nerve-wracking time for those who left printing their posters off until the last minute and are desperately trying to find places that are open during the festive period. One of the funny things I find when travelling to the conference location (via public transport) is that the closer to the city you get, the number of poster tubes increases exponentially, as you spot other fellow attendees heading in the same direction as you.

From experience, it is usually after reaching a main transport hub, such as a major train station, is when you start to bump into other attendees waiting on the platforms and start striking up conversations. Especially if they are a new face, the conversation usually follows a similar pattern of “Ah I see you have a poster. What is your research about?”, then “Where are you coming from?” and eventually reaches a point where the formal introduction questions end and a general friendly conversation begins as you continue your journey to the final stop.

When you finally arrive at the city, phones come out as everyone tries to figure out where their accommodation is. With a Google Maps direction set, see you laters are said to those you met along the way as you hurry off. Once you arrive at your accommodation, bags are quickly thrown down, posters carefully propped up and quick toilet breaks taken before you open up the event documents to find out where the Ice Breaker event is.

Ice Breakers are a welcoming event commonly held as a local venue for the early birds to gather together the night before and catch over a drink and natter. This is the place where you search the room looking for familiar faces of colleagues you haven’t seen in a long time (usually since the last conference) and form small clusters. As the evening progresses, people tend to venture off and join other clusters, originally saying hi to old faces but get introduced to new ones. This process continues throughout the evening until eventually people either get too tired or it becomes so quiet at the venue groups venture off to find somewhere else to continue their conversations.

Days Two to Four – Science Time

Waking up bright and early, its common for attendees to have arranged meeting others – often in the hotel lobby that you discovered you’re all staying at – and walk to the main hosting venue. For those who had a good night sleep, its an exciting time as they look forward to all the science they are about to learn throughout the day. For those who didn’t sleep to well – usually those stressing about their presentation later in the day, or those who stayed out way too late – their minds are elsewhere, but eventually align with all the others after a coffee break.

The majority of your time spent at an academic conference will be sat watching a wide range of presentations being given in a theatre. They are commonly divided into separate topics so that attendees have an easier time deciding which they want to listen to. Each presentation generally lasts for 10-15 minutes (or is meant to, some run on longer) and are followed up with some questions from the audience.

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Each day there are also Panel Talks given by a collection of people talking about a given topic. Commonly, one talk is about alternative paths outside of academia. These are great for the younger members of the audience to give them an idea of a variety of different careers they could possibly take if they are beginning to think academic is not for them anymore.

Networking

Networking is one of the most important aspects of conferences, and there are plenty of opportunities to do so throughout the event. We have already had the journey up if you spoke to people on the way and the Ice Breaker. During the main event there are coffee breaks and dedicated poster sessions where you can seek out and speak to other attendees. With such a wealth of people at conferences, having all of these chances to talk to various people can be extremely useful!

In the past I have used the opportunities to meet fellow student peers who I went on to organise accommodations with at future conferences, met and spoke to potential PhD supervisors, and my biggest highlight was meeting Prof Iain Stewart. Growing up watching BBC documentaries presented by Iain, he was a very strong inspiration for me and my pathway into volcanology, so having the opportunity to meet and thank him for that was great. What added to it was discussing my work with him and gaining excellent feedback from it.

Workshops & Field Trips

One of the added bonus of attending conferences is the inclusion of workshops and field trips arranged by the organisers. The workshops are largely given by members of the community and specialises on a particular aspect related to the conference topic, such as a piece of software that has recently been developed.

Field trips are an exciting part of the conference, especially for us geologists – we love any opportunity to go outside and look at rocks. Depending on who is hosting and whether or not they have some local rocks worth showing, these are often short journeys down the road. In the recent years with things being forced online, the use of virtual field trips have helped continue these fun trips. This year at the vVMSG2022, the University of Manchester team were able to take us on a trip to the Moon!

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Evening Meal

The last hurrah of conferences is the meal on the evening of the second to last day. While starting out of a (semi-) formal meal, once the food is gone the music starts! I won’t dive too much into the embarrassing dancing and singing that goes on, but for anyone who hasn’t attended a conference before, look forward to this meal! Just remember though that there are still some presentations still running the next morning.

Virtual Conferences

Virtual conferences are a relatively new style that has emerged as a result of the global pandemic. Instead of disappointing their members, Societies were quick to organise online conferences via Zoom and many other virtual platforms we have recently grown used to in the past two years.

The first virtual conference I attended was vVMSG2021, and while the new style of conferencing may have come with a few teething issues on the first day, it was generally well received by attendees for a variety of reasons. The first being that conferences could continue without disruptions or worries related to the pandemic. The second was how much easier it was for people to attend the conference. Gone were the stresses of organising accommodation, transport, child-care etc. Instead, everyone could enjoy the wealth of new scientific knowledge from the comfort of their own home! This also provided an additional benefit, especially for national conferences, allowing them to become international! The vVMSG2021 conference – a commonly UK and Ireland dominated conference – saw hundreds of attendees from numerous countries around the world! Some were even able to give a presentation on their research, enriching the already diverse degree of volcanic research that is given at the annual conference. And it appears this years vVMSG2022 conference is also seeing a large number of foreign attendees as well, which is great to hear!

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Another great benefit was that people could easily duck in and out of different talks. This is something that isn’t so easy during in-person. It can be awkward trying to scoot past rows of people and walk out the room – like going for a bathroom break at a cinema, but with the lights on and believing everyone knows its because you aren’t interested in the the next talk…

That being said, spending three days on continuous Zoom calls, even if you could come and go, did cause a bit of Zoom fatigue by the end of it. The lack of social interaction, which to me is always a highlight of conferences, was also noticeable. Social events like movie and quiz nights try their best to fill the gap. However, it is not quite the same. But perhaps there is a way to take the best of both worlds – in-person and virtual – to form the best kind of conference…

Hybrid Conferences – The New Normal?

The answer to how to create the best type of conference is hybridisation! The CENTA Student 2021 conference was my first experience of such a conference and seemed to do very well at addressing problems of the previously mentioned conference styles.

Hybrids work by running a regular in-person conference with a camera pointed at the front stage to give a visual feed to those who are watching online. Additionally, CENTA dedicated specific time slots to those who wished to give virtual presentations and answered questions via Zoom.

While this does mean more work for the conference organisers (having to set up the online side of it as well), the result means that it is ultimately down to the attendees to decide which experience they want to get from the conference. If people can make it in person and want to meet face-to-face they can. If others would rather remain at home, either because they have home-based commitments, the event location is too far away, or they do not have enough available time to attend the whole event, they can instead duck in and out whenever online.

It maybe early days, but I do hope that this style becomes the new normal for all conferences. Along with the above mentioned benefits, by having this online availability, we can open up our research presentations to the rest of the world, just like how the vVMSG conferences have proved. After all, one of the main things in scientific research is trying to get it out to as many people as possible.

I hope you have enjoyed this blog about conferences, based on my own experiences. I hope to go to an international conference at some point soon in the future. Then I’ll be able to see how different they are to national ones and hopefully expand my network even further.