Something my dad has always told me to is to travel while I'm still young and I've been trying to make that happen, especially since I have so much more control over my time now that I'm a graduate student. Over the summer, the post doc in my lab and I did some researching to find conferences to attend in Europe, as he himself is English and completed his PhD over in Germany. Yes, rather than looking for conferences in our subject area, we picked a location first and prayed there might be a conference close enough to what we do that we could convince my advisor to let us go. We ended up finding a conference taking place in Porto, Portugal in June 2022 with an abstract deadline of Jan 31st, 2022.
Since it was probably August or September 2021 at the time, we didn't worry about preparing the abstract and although I never forgot about it, I also kind of just let in the back of my mind as we proceeded through the rest of the year. After finishing up our conference in Phoenix, I was so physically and mentally exhausted I took a week off and whenever the momentum of productivity is stopped, it takes me quite some time to rev myself back up. Even the week after taking a full week off, I still wasn't nearly as productive as I was before the holidays. I was enjoying "PhD life", seeing my friends, and going golfing on SCHOOL NIGHTS. Are school nights even still a thing in grad school? Maybe not, everyday is just an other work day....
Anyway, last Monday my advisor and I both agreed it was time to start considering writing up our abstracts for this European conference. Last time, we worked on and submitted our abstracts for SICB literally the day the were due. I swore to myself and told him we would NEVER wait until the day of to work on our abstracts ever again. Typically, abstracts are just paragraphs under 250 words summing up the project you worked on, stating the findings, and then its significance. It's kind of like a preview into what the presentation will be about, whether that be in the format of a talk or a poster.
Much to my dismay, this particular conference has very specific guidelines for their abstracts, requiring both the information found in a typical abstract, but also including figures and allowing for up to 500 words instead of the typical 500. Although I had the data for one of my abstract submissions processed, analyzed, and the pertinent figures generated, my other abstract's data had not been processed at all. I had to write a MATLAB code in order to analyze the forces we collected from our parrots, but the classical center of mass calculations were so far out of my comfort zone I needed to consult a good friend with a much better basis in math and physics in order to ensure all my math was sound. The code wasn't finished and ready for use until last week and since the volume of data (over 700 trials) was so massive, it actually took me over a week to process all the data, clean up the outliers, and then actually begin trying to understand what it meant.
I spent the last three days in the same spot working nearly 12 hour days to create all the figures we needed for this abstract. I have never understood the meaning of insanity more than I did after this marathon - making the same figures over and over until they looked exactly how I wanted, and rerunning the same set of stats to confirm my story. 72 hours, long zoom calls with my post doc, and angry messages to my advisor later, my abstracts were submitted, 1.5 hours before the deadline :)
Some things never change I guess....
Thanks for reading!! dee ღ
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