Lessons from a Poster Session
Nov. 14th, 2005 09:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marcusmarcusrc1) Rich people get fed really really good food. The paella was heavenly, as were various different small finger foods which I couldn't identify. But do you really need to serve your melon and pineapple in slices so thin you could read a book through them? (nice visual effect though)
2) Rich people also get hit with very effective brainwashing rays. After sitting through Hockfield's talk I had this impressively warm glow about MIT. I mean, I like MIT enough to have come here twice (or three times, if you count Day Camp), but on the other hand, 9 years as a student here leads to accumulating a few layers of cynicism for even the shiny happiest of us. And I was _really_ feeling good about MIT after the talk. I think my favorite point was that after Hockfield gloated about MIT's 9 Nobel prizes since 1990 (2 more than #2 Stanford, 6 more than our favorite school up the river), she said that the important bit was that 6 of the winners had been hired to MIT as junior faculty. Whereas most top schools get their best scientists by stealing them from other universities. And she said this in a way that led us to think that MIT was this nice, happy, nurturing place where interactions with colleagues helped everyone reach their best potential. And now that I read that, I realize that the brainwashing is wearing off, because that really isn't true... but I was _believing_ it at the time.
3) I'm fine at being nice to people, and babbling about my research. Which I guess is why I was picked to go to this thing. I'm not good at working people to get useful contacts for myself, sadly. Which, besides the tasty free food, and (more importantly) the fact that my advisor told me I was going, was why I wanted to be there. I guess the lack of this skill is why I'm not a Sloan student.
2) Rich people also get hit with very effective brainwashing rays. After sitting through Hockfield's talk I had this impressively warm glow about MIT. I mean, I like MIT enough to have come here twice (or three times, if you count Day Camp), but on the other hand, 9 years as a student here leads to accumulating a few layers of cynicism for even the shiny happiest of us. And I was _really_ feeling good about MIT after the talk. I think my favorite point was that after Hockfield gloated about MIT's 9 Nobel prizes since 1990 (2 more than #2 Stanford, 6 more than our favorite school up the river), she said that the important bit was that 6 of the winners had been hired to MIT as junior faculty. Whereas most top schools get their best scientists by stealing them from other universities. And she said this in a way that led us to think that MIT was this nice, happy, nurturing place where interactions with colleagues helped everyone reach their best potential. And now that I read that, I realize that the brainwashing is wearing off, because that really isn't true... but I was _believing_ it at the time.
3) I'm fine at being nice to people, and babbling about my research. Which I guess is why I was picked to go to this thing. I'm not good at working people to get useful contacts for myself, sadly. Which, besides the tasty free food, and (more importantly) the fact that my advisor told me I was going, was why I wanted to be there. I guess the lack of this skill is why I'm not a Sloan student.
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Date: 2005-11-15 12:21 pm (UTC)However "happy, warm, nurturing" is perhaps pushing it. But for a brief time last night, I was totally in the fuzzy happy place...