Conference buddy

Conferences are important part of the scientific life. This is where the scientists are presenting their results to their colleagues and put their hypothesis under pressure.

However, to be perfectly honest, the most important part of a conference is not happening in the lecture halls. Everything is decided, new collaboration initiated, ideas launched, during the social activities, meaning in the bars.

To be 100% honest, scientific conferences are more or less a good excuse for travelling, visit nice place and drink with your colleagues (if you do not believe me, read “A small world” by David Lodge).

As a consequence, the success of a conference depends mainly on your ability to socialize; the ideal situation being when you know someone who knows everyone (which is the case when I go to conference with my boss).

The worst case scenario is when you are the newbie.

It is the case in the conference I am attending today.

It is my first participation to this conference; 90% of the 500 attendees are British and most of them know each other.

To make this a success, I need to find a “conference buddy”, a fun guy to hang around with, a scientific “wing man”.

That was my goal yesterday when I went to the welcome mixer “party” (after an overpriced fish and chips in a bad restaurant after failing finding a nice pub in Hatfield… Actually I either didn’t find the centre of the city or find it and it is then very depressing).

I love conference and I attend to a lot of them. There is something unique about British ones. You have fantastic breakfasts (sausages, bacon and eggs this morning) and the organized “parties” are a little sad.

Yesterday, the welcome mixer party took place in the campus bar. It looked exactly like a gymnastic hall in any highschool: a big square room with no windows and blue walls. The only difference with a gymnastic hall was the presence of a small bar (thanks god) in one corner. On the other side, a string quartet was sadly playing, the music being covered by the sounds of the conversation.

My boss sent me once a slide show showing pictures comparing ladies in a night club in England and a night club in Sweden: one being full of gorgeous blonds, the other full of wasted fat girls.

Nothing like that yesterday however I could guess that I was not in Sweden.

I grabbed my one and only glass of free glass (for comparison, in a conference in Portugal, we had an open bar with free booze, beer and wine and nice folk music) and started looking for my conference buddy.

One hundred people were already there, split in small groups of 3 to 10 persons. I rapidly found my prey, a guy who looked as lonely as me.

- Hello, you look as lost as I am. It is my first BES meeting and I virtually know nobody here.

He smiled at me

- This is also my first BES meeting

- My name is Sam

- My name is blablabla

- Nice to meet you.

Of course, his name was not “blablabla” and it is not a way to keep his identity secret (even if quite convenient). Actually, there is a strange psychological process activated in my brain when I ask some specific questions like “what’s your name?” or “How can I go to the train station?” As soon as the person in front of me starts to answer, I just cannot pay attention. My brain shuts downs. This can lead to very embarrassing situations.

After a couple of minutes talking about where we comes from and our research, our 2 persons groups attracted some other lonely foreigners lost in this British ocean.

At the end of the “party” (the string quartet commit suicide), our little group was quite nice: a couple of French, a finish, a Romanian, a German, a Swedish and a Belgian. It was a pleasant evening but I did not find my conference buddy (but it was good enough to find somebody I know during breakfast).

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