I’ve been compiling some advice for my undergraduate students for attending their first AAS meeting.  I got a lot of good input from my graduate student Jason Curtis (who wrote a majority of the text about posters below) and Ming Zhao. This post has also been wiki-fied over at AstroBetter.

Before the Meeting:

Look through the meeting registration list early, and invite people over email to come check out your poster/talk. This includes collaborators and their students; past colloquium speakers, professors, and classmates (for grads and postdocs, you might know dozens of people at the meeting from past classes in undergrad and grad school); names in the field; and directors and personnel from observatories you’ve used or hope to use in your research. The email invitation can be simple:  introduce yourself, you’re so-and-so’s student, you’ve been working on some project together and are presenting results at Poster #### on Tuesday, if you have time come by and check it out. If you only plan to be at your poster during official poster times, state that.

Also look over titles and abstracts of the posters and make a note of those you really need to see.  Save them to your schedule on the AAS Meeting app so that you remember to go find them on the correct day.

Undergraduate reception:  

If you’re an undergraduate thinking about graduate school, you should absolutely go; it’s usually held the evening before the main event.  

Otherwise, and especially if you are a graduate student, consider spending some time at your school’s booth and help recruit.

It’s busy, but it’s an undergraduate’s opportunity to find a school they like.  

Whoever you are, ask/answer lots of questions.  Talk about your research. These are your future peers and collaborators. 

Opening reception:

This is the warmup to the main event.  There will be lots of old friends finding each other and sharing drinks and snacks.  Go find people from your department and make sure they know you’re at the meeting.  Say hi again to the people you met at the undergrad reception.  Make dinner plans.

Networking dinners:

There are several networking dinners during the meeting.  The AAS Committee for Sexual-Orientation and Gender Minorities in Astronomy (SGMA) has hosted an LGBTIQ dinner for over twenty years!  The date/time/location is listed in the meeting program.  Check the program and social media for other networking dinners sponsored by groups including the AAS Committee on the Status of Minorities in Astronomy.

Talking to people:  

It’s why we have these meetings.  Walk up and say ‘hi’.  Introduce yourself. Say who you work with and what you are doing. First names are OK; there are no titles on badges for a reason.

Who should you talk to?  Seek out your co-authors and collaborators.  If you see a talk or a poster you’re interested in, or just a name you recognize, say ‘hi’.

Astronomy is small;  we all know each other, so you won’t be more than 2 degrees removed from anyone at the conference.  Figure out who those degrees are.

If you are thinking about grad school and you see a student from an institution you’re interested in, talk with them about it.  Ask them about applying to grad school.

Attending Oral Presentations:

Attend the presentations you selected for your schedule on Sunday.  It’s OK to jump around; they do their best to stay on time, even just sitting in silence for a few minutes if a speaker doesn’t show up to keep the schedule, so if you sit in the back and quietly sneak out during Q&A you can mix-and-match sessions.

Definitely attend the talks of people you know personally, and let them know later that you did and compliment them on something you liked about it.

You can ask questions.

After presentations are an excellent time to speak with presenters in that session.  The speakers will still be around, so it’s a nice chance to walk up to them and compliment them and introduce yourself and ask them questions and tell them about your research etc etc. This is especially good if you want to meet some intimidating names of your field — if it feels a bit awkward to just say hi to them in the poster hall or hallway it’s never awkward to talk to them right after their talks. 

Giving Oral Presentations:

Whole bookshelves have been written on this subject, so I’ll skip the general advice, except to say that you should minimize text on your slide.  They’re visual aids, not scripts. Caryl Gronwall points to Julianne Delcanton’s guide to 5 minute talks, and AstroBetter has lots and lots and lots of links for advice here.

Particular to AAS meetings:

You have to pre-load your presentation.  Go to the ready-room and make sure it works.  Check every slide, especially animations, weird fonts, etc.  I always bring a PDF backup;  PDF viewers are very reliable.

You hardly have any time.  Skip the introductory material and focus on one, big, punchy result in just a few slides.  Your practice talk in your hotel room the night before should run about a minute too long because you’ll be speaking much faster once you’re up there.  Don’t run long on your actual talk; it’s very rude to the subsequent speakers and the audience.

The best use of your time is to advertise your research, let them know if there’s a related poster, and put your name and face out there so people can find you and talk to you later.

Plenary Sessions:

These are the sessions where everyone attends at once (no concurrent events) in the main hall.  They include official AAS business and prize lectures.  They’re often early in the morning.  You can learn a lot about the field at these.

The Poster Sessions

If you have a poster: 

Making your poster: I recommend following principle of good poster design, which I’ve written about here (more at AstroBetter here).

If you are entering the Chambliss Award competition (you should!) then familiarize yourself with the guidelines (which can be found here).  Use the official scoring rubric to score your poster against posters in the hall of your department to see what improvements you could make.  Make sure you practice your 5 minute spiel, and make sure to be at your poster during your judging period.

It’s OK to skip oral sessions on the day of your poster:   Unless there’s something they really want or need to see, many people stay with their poster the entire day, only leaving for lunch and plenary sessions. Some people like going to the posters during the breakout oral sessions because the poster hall is less crowded and you can have longer conversations without interruption. You might have fewer visitors, but if you have one good one it can make the meeting.  That said, don’t miss any talks you really want to see!  

Meet the Neighbors:  The oral session is also a good time to meet your poster neighbors. You are all grouped together by theme, so not only are these colleagues, these are potential collaborators and employers, or students/postdocs if you’re hiring. Talk to the older neighbors — they are probably experts.

Even if you don’t have a poster:

The poster session is an essential networking and outreach activity, for at least 4 reasons:

1. Find the people that are experts in whatever you need to do.
2. Form new collaborations
3. Advertise your results
4. See and be seen – get to know the astronomy community.

Plan ahead:  Look through the meeting registration list early, and invite people over email to come check out your poster. This includes collaborators and their students; past colloquium speakers, professors, and classmates (for grads and postdocs, you might know dozens of people at the meeting from past classes in undergrad and grad school); names in the field; and directors and personnel from observatories you’ve used or hope to use in your research. The email invitation can be simple:  introduce yourself, you’re so-and-so’s student, you’ve been working on some project together and are presenting results at Poster/Talk #### on Tuesday, if you have time come by and check it out. If you only plan to be at your poster during official poster times, state that.

Also look over titles and abstracts of the posters and make a note of those you really need to see.  Definitely visit the posters of anyone you know, and other students in your department. If the presenter isn’t by their poster when you visit, go back later.

Talk to poster presenters:  Learn about their work, talk about yours, and if you have been experiencing some difficulty or road block in your work, talk about that! Talk to the young neighbors too — I often see young astronomers standing around quietly by their poster, sometimes facing it reviewing their work. Go introduce yourself. Invite them to lunch. If you are applying for jobs, remember — their advisor will come find them eventually, so talk to them too.

New collaborations:  An example from Jason Curtis:  

I met one astronomer last winter at AAS Austin during a poster session, and he had an idea for a project. We bumped into each other again at an Austin astronomy happy hour on Friday after the meeting. We wrote a few proposals together, one wasn’t accepted and another got time on Magellan. We went down to Chile and observed together, and are now working on a few papers. His former advisor (Martin Asplund) became interested in the star cluster and brought together a group to submit a VLT proposal to conduct a detailed abundance study of the F dwarfs in the cluster – we got 16 hours.

Follow up: If you’ve had a good conversation and want to get back to someone later on take a picture of their badge (ask first), and then immediately email it to yourself with bullet points from your conversation. Some of the followup emails can be extensive and take time to write, but instead of waiting until your ready to follow up, you can send a short email telling them it was good to meet them and that you’ll write again soon about what you discussed. This is also a good strategy if you toyed with the idea at the meeting about collaborating on a future proposal. Email them immediately after the conference (or during, maybe they’d like to go to lunch or dinner and discuss it further) and say you’ll give some more thought to the project and let’s talk again when the call for proposals is released.

Make plans:  This is also a good time to make dinner and evening plans. If you have one or a few friends at the conference, don’t just go on your own—someone you met earlier is probably standing around with a group of other students somewhere. Go find out what they are doing.

Dinner and lunch: 

Find people to eat with.  Co-authors, members of your institution, and people you know personally are good places to start.  Lots of students at the meeting don’t know many people; introduce yourself and form your own lunch group.

Town Hall Sessions:

Attend at least one of the Town Hall meetings. This is a unique opportunity at the AAS to see some of how the business of the field works: the budgets, the long term planning, the community aspirations and feedback, the give and take. For students and others getting started in the field, going to one of these meetings can provide a valuable perspective on the complexity and effort needed to keep the field running, and the broader context in which our research must take place. And it’s something you can’t really see anywhere else. There are many of these, for both the funding agencies and major observatories (NASA, NSF, NOAO, Gemini, JWST, more), so you can easily find one that’s relevant to your interests.

Also see: Newbies’ Guide to Town Halls

Closing reception:

There will be lots of snacks not-to-be-construed-as-dinner, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.  Mingle and hunt down those last few astronomers you haven’t found yet but have been meaning to talk to.

Social Media:

The official hashtag of AAS meetings is usually #aasXXX where XXX is the meeting number.

Harassment:

The AAS meeting is a professional venue and should be treated as such. Whatever interactions between people may be appropriate in general or in the abstract, at a professional meeting the degree of professionalism expected starts high, and increases strongly with the degree of power and/or seniority imbalance in an interaction.

Not all members of our community treat the AAS meeting as the professional venue it is. At every meeting there are people who treat it as a singles bar or worse, so it is important that all members of our community understand what harassment is and how to deal with it.

For that reason, you should read the AAS anti-harassment policy.  The bottom line: Do not treat AAS meetings as a nightclub.

Junior scientists should be able to expect to be treated professionally, most especially by senior scientists, and should know the serial harasser’s playbook so they can try to terminate toxic interactions before they escalate.

If you see a situation in which a person is being treated in an unprofessional manner, there are several ways you can help. You can give the person receiving the unwanted attention a safe “out,” for instance by inserting yourself into the conversation and giving the recipient someone else to talk with. If the harasser is a peer, and you feel comfortable doing so, pull them aside and explain to them why their behavior is not appropriate.

Inviting someone to lunch or dinner for two, especially if there is a large power imbalance, can plausibly be (mis)construed as an unwanted romantic or sexual advance. Good practice is to organize meals in groups of three or larger. If you find yourself on either side of such an invitation, round up at least one more person to prevent misunderstandings or awkwardness. This has the bonus effect of increasing opportunities for networking.

Do not assume that harassment only occurs with an older man harassing a younger women.

Astronomy Allies:

The Astronomy Allies program was developed to address the issue of harassment at AAS meetings. Look for the Allies’ badges at the meeting and at the party. They are a safe zone, a resource, a safe walk home, and a presence. If you see someone behaving unprofessionally, let the Allies know, even if you were not comfortable intervening, so that they know who to keep an eye on in the future.

This post has been wiki-fied over at AstroBetter.

This post is being regularly updated with good advice — it has been edited from its original state to be an “evergreen” including text from the AstroBetter wiki.