Gathering

Next week I go off to meetings. Presenting a paper on research at meetings is pretty much an annual event. But this is the first time I've presented at the particular meetings I'm going to, and it's the first time in years I've presented at a Major Research Society.

I'm having a little stress.

My paper is done - or as done as it's going to be, it's preliminary results - and I've practiced it and all, but I'm still stressing. One thing I've learned about the Major Reseach Society meetings is that there are a few people who attend them who are basically big dillweeds.

They are the people who live to tear down other people's research in front of a crowd, because they think it makes them look big. I've never had it happen to me, but I've seen it happen and it's ugly and you just HURT for the poor person standing up at the front of the room (more often than not a grad student, it seems).

Look - I have no problem with letting someone know their research is flawed, or there are things they've not considered. However, I think doing it in a bombastic and public way is kind of unprofessional. My tendency - in the few occasions where I've been the "expert" and someone who is a "non-expert" has sorta messed something up, is for me to catch them on their way out of the session and quietly ask them, "Hey, have you considered x, y, and z?" or "You know, you might want to try doing a different analysis [and give an example] on those data."

It just feels wrong to me to loudly correct someone in front of an audience.

But there are people who do it. Some of them are people who, I think, just have security issues - if they're not the center of attention, why, then, they might just as well be INVISIBLE! Some of them are people who genuinely think they're providing a service - either they're doing the version of rubbing a puppy's nose in its "accident" ("This is so you won't ever make that mistake again!") or they're hoping to so humiliate the person that they never show their face at a meeting again.
Perhaps some of them are just so socially awkward/retarded that they don't understand that calling a grad student an "idiot" in front of his or her peers is a bad thing.

But at any rate...even though it's never happened to me, having seen it happen is enough to keep me up at nights a little bit before the meeting. (This time next week it should be over...my presentation at least, if I'm reading the schedule right).

Oh, I also had the fear I've been dropped from the schedule...they didn't have one up until just now. I received confirmation of my talk and all that, but no communication at all between then and now.

Heh. I see I'm an 8 am, Monday talk. That's good - maybe some of the potential "hecklers" will still be in bed but I'll have lots of shiny-faced grad students and new profs at the talk.

I hope my talk is good enough. I hope it's well-received.

I'm not going to read the abstracts in detail about the other talks...one has the word "heuristic" in the title and a couple others involve rflps. That scares me a little - I hope I'm not trying to run with a crowd smarter than I am. I mean, I don't mind being "just barely" the least-accomplished or stupidest one, but I really really mind it being obvious that all the other talks are so far above mine.

(No, that's never actually happened. But still).

One of the problems is I'm at a small school, where research is totally done "on your own time." We don't have lots of fancy equipment and my paper is largely a literature survey and metanalysis of data that other people have collected, and I'm just worried that people are going to snark at it and I'm going to feel humiliated. (Well, if worse comes to worse, I'll be done by 8:15 on Monday and if I feel too much like an idiot, I can cancel my second and third night hotel stays, change my train tickets, and go home early.)

So anyway. I don't remember being this nervous before a talk before...perhaps that's because this is the first time I have NO co-authors, I'm the only one doing this work - so it's not been bounced off of a particular very critical person and refined to within an inch of its life. Also, as I said, I've never been to these meetings before so I have no idea as to the tone. A colleague of mine who has been to them describes them as "relaxed and supportive," but he's also one of those people who's oblivious to criticism and the subtle, body-language signs that people use to say, "I think you're a dork" when they aren't quite willing to come out and say it.

(I hope he's right and I'm overreacting. I always have a little bit of an inferiority complex coming from a small, low-priority-on-research school.

I'm afraid someone will say the biologist version of Sheila's, "Don't even try, CHiPS!" to me, and that I'll be devastated, and that I won't even be able to control my emotions long enough for me to sit down. [Again - it's never happened, but with harsh enough criticism and bad nerves, I could imagine it happening. And getting upset in front of a bunch of fellow scientists...well, you might as well just hang it up and open the dog grooming parlor the next week, because you'll never work in the science biz again...])

It also involves a certain amount of complex traveling, involving several types of conveyances. (How much does one tip a big-city taxi driver these days? Seriously. It's been, like, at least ten years since I took a cab anywhere.) And it's in a big city, which just makes me a little tense to begin with. (Especially now. I don't THINK the terrorists would try anything on American soil, but you never know - I'm going to be right in the "fancy hotel district" so it's not exactly a non-obvious place).

I'm just not that big on traveling (overnight traveling, traveling where you're at the mercy of others' schedules) anyway. My feeling is: I paid a lot of money for my house. I put in a lot of effort to make my house nice. Why should I abandon my house for a strange hotel room somewhere else? (I like taking day-trips, but I'm serious about this - I really don't like staying in hotels; I'd much rather return to my own nice house at the end of the day.)

So anyway. I've been doing what I can to assuage the horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach that Something Is Going To Go Terribly Wrong. I have printouts of my hotel reservations (just in case they claim they never heard of me and never got my reservation). I have printouts of my receipt of the registration for the meetings (ditto). I'm practicing my talk multiple times each day, even practicing my nonchalant laugh and, "Oh, these are just PRELIMINARY results" casual statement as a hope of staving off someone who might be starting in with snark.

And I'm reminding myself that even if it does go badly, in a week now, it will all be over. Kind of like the way I think about dental appointments.