Lessons from a Poster Session

[marcusmarcusrc]

1) 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.

Comments

[shumashi.livejournal.com]

I highly recommend making business cards. It is both a simple and generally accepted way to indicate your interest in a contact, and to exchange contact information. And there's lots of tricks people do to weasel out of it if they don't want to give it to you, either pretending they don't have any or having a fairly generic version of their card with contact info for their secretary or their company's front desk, so it's not like you're forcing an awkward situation on them. It's an expected business interaction.

At GDC last year, I went to a panel where the moderator was very interesting and her background was at Disney, which I was interested in. Sadly, I had about five minutes between her panel finishing and me getting to the lecture I was helping out with. As she came down and sat, I approached her, shook her hand, introduced myself, and gave her a one minute monologue about who I was and what about her work I found interested. I ended by apologizing that I was committed to another lecture, but could I please have her card, so we could talk later? She said sure, we exchanged cards, and that led to me finding a really great mentor in my field. So there's a success story for you right there.

Keep in mind that people come to these things to find out about you as well. Networking is mutually beneficial.

[marcusmarcusrc.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I learned about the business card thing last year, where I went to this big ministerial meeting in DC (lots of politicians, CEOs, ambassadors, and whatnot), and everyone was handing them out like candy. I collected quite a few of them, but didn't have any to hand back. Since then I made business cards, which I even brought with me and set out next to my poster, but didn't actually try giving directly to anyone... Maybe I'll do better at the January conference I have to speak at...