(in case it isn’t clear, this is a picture of me standing next to my poster at Psychonomics)
Things I was warned about before Psychonomics by my advisor/grad students in my lab:
- It is big and overwhelming
- People may ask you tough questions at the poster session
Things I got myself all worried about before the conference:
- What to wear
- How to best fly with a poster
- My small-talk skills
Things that were not an issue:
- What to wear
- How to best fly with a poster
- My small-talk skills
Things that were only kind of an issue:
- Tough questions at the poster session
- It is big and overwhelming
Unexpected things that were more of an issue:
- What to do for meals/free time
Yes, Psychonomics is big and overwhelming. There were nearly 2,000 poster presentations split across 5 1.5-hour poster sessions, and the rest of the time there were various talk sessions going on. The language researchers were certainly present, but so were the judgment/decision-making people, the working memory people, the metacognition people, the emotion processing people, and people from any other realm of cognitive psychology you can think of. There’s just a lot going on, all the time. Add the fact that the conference took place in Vancouver, Canada and there was no Wi-Fi available on the ground floor of the convention center, and it starts to feel a bit more overwhelming.
But I figured out how to make it feel smaller and more manageable: I focused on the language stuff. The language posters were always grouped together, so I would spend most of my time in the language aisle and just walk past the other posters to see if anything caught my eye. I parked myself in the psycholinguistics/bilingualism talk sessions for their entirety. And as I did that, people started to look familiar. I saw people whose work I have read, and started to be able to put names to faces.
The only time I truly started to feel overwhelmed by the size of Psychonomics was about an hour before my poster session began. The poster session was 6-7:30 pm on Friday, but my poster had to be set up by 3:45 for the walkthrough (without author present) from 4-6. I setup at 3:30, then walked upstairs to the free Wi-Fi (and comfortable chairs) so I could look through my data one more time so I was ready to answer questions. At around 4:15 I went back downstairs to look at all the other posters in the session. After 45 minutes or so of wandering and reading, I was starting to feel like my poster wouldn’t measure up, was worried I would get something wrong while presenting to a language science hotshot, and generally just felt nervous, so I went and hid in the bathroom for a few minutes. Once I went back into the ballroom and started talking to people about my research, everything was smooth sailing.
At one point during the poster session, I found myself just looking around and taking in the fact that there were thousands of people who flew in from around the world to congregate and discuss their exciting research. There was just so much science happening. I saw researchers acting like people and catching up with old friends from undergraduate, graduate, post-doc, or early career years, and it made me realize that hopefully, that will be me someday.
Almost all of the Penn Staters (and former Penn Staters/people with Penn State affiliations) involved with language science stopped by my poster to learn about my research, and most of them commended me on what I had done as an undergraduate. I met Dr. Darren Tanner, a former post-doc at Penn State who had left before I arrived, but for whom I collected data my freshman year, and he offered genuine advice on how to further analyze my data. Dr. Sarah Grey, the post-doc I worked closely with my freshman and sophomore years, came by and I got to tell her all about what I’ve been working on since she left. I finally had the chance to meet Brendan Tomoschuk, who had been an undergrad research assistant in the same lab as me but graduated just before I came to Penn State—I had heard about Brendan for years without us ever meeting. I caught up with other former undergrad RAs in my lab who have since left and moved on to graduate school.
Perhaps the best unexpected benefit of this trip, though, was the chance to rekindle my love of independence. I love being independent and having the chance to just do my own thing, but it’s really hard to do that when you are surrounded by your friends and there’s always somebody asking you questions and vying for your attention. This weekend, I was a country away from those people and questions. I got to push off my responsibilities for just a few days and explore Vancouver and Psychonomics on my own. I always feel so guilty taking time for myself when I know there are things I could be doing, but this weekend showed me that maybe that’s okay every once in a while. I may have a ton of things waiting for me in State College that need to be accomplished before Thanksgiving, but now I’m approaching them with a fresh mind after a weekend completely away.
Erika! Congratulations on such a successful experience. I’m so happy that it was such a satisfying and rewarding first poster experience. I think anticipation of things, like you mention in your post is one of my greatest struggles as well. Anticipation allows us to make up negative possibilities where they don’t actually exist. Success is almost always achieved by hard work, thoughtful action, and believing in oneself. It’s also great you had the opportunity to independently explore and practice some self-care. It’s easy to forget that but it’s key to being productive and most importantly being happy and healthy!