Torrey L.S. Truszkowski

In February 2018, I attended the American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas. I presented my dissertation research as a poster in the new E-poster format and spent a ton of time networking and learning about science communication.

I was awarded the Helen F. Holt Scholarship for Young Women in Science to pay my travel expenses for the meeting. The award breakfast where my award was presented was the highlight of the meeting. I got to hear my own accomplishments read out by Rush Holt himself, and for the first time I realized just how much I have managed to accomplish in graduate school.

2018 Travel Award winners with AAAS CEO Rush Holt at the Minority and Women Scientists and Engineers Breakfast. 

I presented my poster as an E-poster, a new format this year for the AAAS meeting. Essentially, we submitted a PDF version of our poster to them and presented it on an 80 inch monitor. Good news: no poster tube in the airport! Bad news: the resolution is still only 1920×1080, so be careful with your text and line sizes. To present our poster, we arrived at one of several “pods” in the exhibit hall and waited our turn. Each presenter got 5 minutes – 3 minutes to present the poster and 2 minutes for questions. Judges sat in front of the poster and interested people milled about the poster area. I enjoyed presenting for judges and the opportunity to win a poster award, but I also felt that many people who wanted to see my poster did not get a chance. Although the posters were available for viewing in the annual meeting app, I don’t know anyone who used this feature. That meant that about 15 people saw my poster for 5 minutes, and anyone else who might have been interested missed it.  However, the future of this format is promising. Perhaps by lengthening the time a presenter stands by their poster and making the posters more obvious in the app, we could strike a good balance between efficiency and effectiveness.

I enjoyed Austin, Texas, a new city for me. The bar scene on Rainey Street is adorable and fun. I played Cornhole in what felt like someone’s backyard with some fellow Friends of Joe’s Big Idea (FOJBIs). I had a chance to catch up with a long time friend and mentor who introduced me to some fabulous Tex-Mex food. I’d love to go back for a vacation!

A few Friends of Joe’s Big Idea hanging out on Rainey St. Love this awesome community of science communicators.

In April 2017, I visited Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for the third time to attend the Wiring the Brain conference. It was a small conference – around 150 people. We spent 4 days listening to talks, seeing posters and eating all of our meals together. I made some good friends by happenstance. We created a table of “orphans” at the first meal. We had all come to the meeting alone, rooming with a stranger and assuming we would find people to talk to at the meeting. We certainly did! A small meeting with meals included facilitates making new friends; I highly recommend them to any scientist, especially graduate students.

In addition to real life conversations, I also joined the Twitter conversation for the meeting with the hashtag #cshlwtb. We were not highly active on social media at the conference, but we had fun. I have compiled our activity into a Storify story to convey the real time conversations and connections we made.

I particularly enjoyed using social media as a way to interact with speakers and conference organizers. 150 people may not seem like much, but it’s enough that any individual person will not have much face to face time with a particular organizer. On social media, though, I could talk to everyone asynchronously. I plan to use a similar strategy at the 30,000 attendee Society for Neuroscience meeting in the future.

Questions about my experience or the science we discussed? Use my contact form!