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Hi everyone, it's been a while since my last post! Today I want to talk a bit about what I learned from my latest academic trips.
To give you context, in the beginning of May I left the UK and went to the US as a visitor at the Center for Computational Astrophysics/Flatiron Institute. During this time, I gave talks in Yale and Princeton. After that, I came back to Durham, stayed for a week and went to the US again for the AstroAI workshop at the Center for Astrophysics/Harvard University, in which I gave a talk. Again, I came back to Durham, stayed for a week and left again but this time for the European Astronomical Society meeting that happened in Padova/Italy, where Galileo lived for 18 years! I was really excited about giving a talk in the first ever intracluster light session!
You can see I travelled a lot, and still have more conferences to go: next week my research group and I are organising the galaxy cluster and gravitational lensing sessions at the National Astronomy Meeting happening in Hull. In August I am also involved in science outreach projects, so more travel to go!
During these trips I had some insights that I want to share with you. Everything written here is about my personal experience only (just to make it clear).
Questions, questions and questions
Different institutes and universities have different behaviours during talks. Fortunately in all of them people asked questions after talks, but the frequency changes for different places. Some places people had infinite questions and we could stay there for ages just asking/answering questions. It would be interesting to investigate why this happens. Still about questions, it seems men ask more questions than women/non-binary people.
Motivation
It was good to see many early career researchers such as first-year PhDs so motivated about science. Many of them were very proactive and you could see they were trying their best. It was nice to see "the new generation" coming with everything.
Social
It's interesting how the "social aspect" works in different places. In some of these places people gathered together after the event all days. In some places people just went to the hotel after the event. This influences the experience in many ways. It's easier to network and meet people when you go out after conferences. However, if you do that everyday, you end up really tired and by the end of the week it is really hard to concentrate in the talks. At the same time, if you just go home and sleep, you have energy for the whole week, but you end up not having connections as strong as it could be. Maybe a mix of both is the ideal?
Number of talks
This might be obvious, but for the first time I noticed how the number of talks can influence the whole experience. If you have less talks and more coffee breaks and an environment to talk to people, the event ends up being much more fluid. On the other hand, when we are organising an event we want to accommodate the maximum amount of talks so we can give opportunity to many people. This is really important because most people can only attend the event if they are presenting their work due to limited amount of funding. The problem is that if your event has a lot of talks, this can be really overwhelming and after some time people are tired and not paying attention. This also depends on how long the event you are organising is. For example, one thing is an event of a week, another thing is a session of 2 hours (which is the case of the galaxy cluster session we are organising at NAM). Anyway, I think the amount of talks is something really important when organising an event, and although we should accommodate as much people as possible, we also have to think about a reasonable limit that is not overwhelming and people can actually pay attention from the beginning to the end.
Random encounters
Conferences are amazing environments for random encounters! During this time in the US and Italy, I met a lot of old friends. Not only that, I ended up randomly meeting people I always wanted to meet. Including people of my own research field (now I have new collaborations!) and also science communicators I admire! It's really fun to meet people you "already know" because of their scientific papers. Now they have a face to me. :)
Diversity
During EAS, there were some diversity sessions. The talks were great, very informative and the session organizers made an awesome work! However, a significant part of the room was empty and some "comments" made by men showed the real necessity of that space. One of the suggestions made by a woman after one of the talks was to have plenary talks about diversity, but apparently this was already discussed in a previous EAS but it did not work out (not clear why). The fact that the session was quite empty is symptomatic. There were important statistics related to minorities in astronomy that everyone was supposed to be aware of, so that's why space in the plenaries is very important. So if you are organising an event, please give space to this type of discussion in the main talks!
Being a visitor
My time at CCA/Flatiron was amazing. My collaborator and I worked a lot in our project and I felt it was really productive. It is really good to work with people that you have synergy. CCA is very different from the other places I have been, they provide everything at the institute, such as breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, coffee, etc. You do not have to leave the institute for anything, which makes you more productive I think. The institute does not have university vibes, it feels more like a company. I also had a chat with a collaborator in Yale that was really productive. Anyway, visiting your collaborator for a few weeks can be really good if you can!
I probably have other opinions on that, but I will stop here for now. I just wanted to register this experience while I have it fresh in my mind! If you have any opinion on that, leave it in the comments! :)
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