My First Conference - Posters

The entire reason behind attending My First Conference was to present some of my research. End-of-year reviews are coming up for the graduate students, and just once it would be nice to have publications to show for my work. One poster presented my master's thesis, which I have since abandoned; the other presented what has become the first two experiments of my dissertation.

The master's thesis poster came first. This was my first-ever poster presentation, so I was greatly relieved to have a lab mate on the board next to me. (Originally, I had been scheduled to present both posters simultaneously, one on either side of my lab mate, but I got them to change one of them. I didn't fancy rushing through her crowd every time someone came up to one or the other poster). I also had very low goals for this poster. I abandoned my master's thesis research as soon as I defended it; I'd spent so much time on it I couldn't bear to even think about the topic any more. My advisor convinced me to submit the work so she'd have some way to cite it. I took 20 handouts, and they were all gone by the end of the session; this is as much as I'd hoped for. The thesis contained an overwhelming series of maybe-results, so I wasn't at all surprised that people listened to the summary with few comments and fewer questions.

The highlight of the poster session was when my advisor arrived, children in tow. She didn't talk to us for long, as she was sidetracked by people she can't talk to any day of the week. But, she did hold court with her (or her kids') admirers right next to our posters, and my lab mate and I spent most of our downtime watching her 6-month-old son gum at her name tag. I considered starting up some bets on whether he would abandon the lower-left corner to nibble on any of the others, but before I could he tasted one and abandoned it quickly. We started discussing why, and eventually settled on a dislike of the string attached to that corner. This is the kind of serious science discussions we engage in at the last session of the first day of a huge conference.

The dissertation poster came last, in every sense: my last presentation in the last session of the last day. It was surprisingly well attended. I put the poster up 20 minutes before the session officially started, and was asked for a summary immediately; attendance was pretty constant for the first hour, as people who weren't going to any of the symposia were trying to gain their freedom from the conference. There was a half-hour lull in the middle, at which point my co-author and I took turns going to check out other posters. Then there was a steady stream of people again, as they started leaving symposia early. We kept going until they turned the lights out (well, half the lights) promptly as 6 p.m.

As this was my dissertation work, I was much more sensitive to comments. I didn't have any of the troubles explaining our measures to people that I have at department talks; either I've gotten better with practice, or our department is overly critical. At least one person thought our explanation for our results made perfect sense, and no one directly challenged it. To me, this is the perfect level of critique; they asked questions to help them understand and connect to other material, and they have to go away and think about it before they can come up with a strong rejoinder. Once again, I gave away all 20 handouts, and had 4 people request electronic copies besides.

Overall, this qualifies as unmitigated success. So much of a success, in fact, that I'm considering submitting something to the next relevant conference, in October. We shall see.

It's Not the Receiving, It's the Reporting

The first of two attempts to get something publishable (i.e., meaningful) out of my master's thesis was a submission of a much simplified version of the thesis to a conference. The challenge was that the only discipline conference to submit to didn't just take poster abstracts on a first-come first-served basis (that was the conference I wanted to submit to when the research was in early phases, but which my advisor vetoed). Instead, you have to submit a six-page paper that would be published in the proceedings of the conference. Pros: reviews of the paper to be read, and more prestige than the normal poster presentation. Cons: submissions are actually reviewed, and get rejected.

At submission, I was of the opinion that the paper was much more interesting and convincing than it had been when written up as my thesis, but was still full of enough only-marginally-significant results that we weren't quite sure how to interpret that it certainly wasn't going to be worth trying to publish elsewhere (although my advisor will veto that opinion as well). The reviewers seem to agree: official verdict is rejection, but there was enough mixed opinion that we go four reviewers in three rounds instead of the two reviewers mentioned in the form response. Individual opinions range from 1/5 (unoriginal fishing expedition) to 4/5 (cautiously recommended as a talk, not just a poster).

I'm not any more upset about this than I was about my abusive FCQ commenter. Perhaps I'm going through an unemotional even-keel week, but I prefer to think I've finally matured to the point that I have realistic opinions of my work and appropriately healthy respect for other peoples' opinions. I can disagree with some of the comments (since when is considering three factors that have reasonable explanations for contributing to something "fishing"? would it be science if I picked my favorite theory and didn't even consider the alternatives?), but overall the comments are in line with my own opinion (not that I would tell my advisor this) of "somewhat interesting results but not at all impressive".

So I'm not bothered by the rejection. What I actually am bothered by is the expectation that my advisor won't let it die. I have no intention of mentioning the status to anyone else unless asked, because I don't need or want whatever consolation comes with manuscript rejection, but I have to notify my co-author. And she'll want to comment, and try to revise and submit it somewhere else, and I'm just done. I'm not particularly interested in following up on the research. I spent two and a half years on the topic, I was incredibly dedicated and fascinated at the time, but interest can only be sustained for so long. I have been forced onto bigger (if not better) things by the requirements for my comps paper, and I would much rather spend my time on the impending research and consign the master's work to the It Is Not Worthy annals of science.

The only question I want to deal with is whether I want to attend the conference as audience. It's an expensive prospect, since funding in my department is generally limited to people who are presenting research. But I've never been to a conference before, and it might be an important piece to figuring out what I want to do. If it's exciting enough, it might even tip me towards research over teaching. There is also the question of how important attending and presenting at conferences will be on my yearly progress reports, since I won't have a chance to present a poster before even next year's progress report is due. I don't want to get a letter or equivalent black mark for not working with the broader scientific community, just because my attempts to do so have been rebuffed.

Trouble by the Numbers

A rant from elsewhere, back in the Thesis Defense phase:

Multiple choice question. Graphs:

a) may or may not show all the work you put into creating them
b) present data much more coherently and completely than words and averages
c) are the product of THE DEVIL or his minions intent on creating chaos and frustration
d) all of the above

Let's consider these different options.

A) This is correct. Excel will automatically put standard error bars on any graphs, but as far as can be determined it pulls these numbers out of its electronic posterior. SPSS is supposed to have a button to add standard error bars, but this doesn't work. I spent two hours Tuesday manually entering standard error bars in Excel, and I will probably spend less than two minutes talking about each one.

B) Also correct. My powerpoint presentations contain few words, and dozens of images. Only one slide in my practice talk contained a verbal explanation of a finding rather than a visual one, and that was because I hadn't had time to create that graph yet. I promptly went and created a very pretty scatterplot showing the relationship between two measures in my experiment in hopes of impressing my committee that my research wasn't an entire null result. Looking at that pretty scatterplot, I discovered an undetected outlier, which let me remove it and make re-do the analyses before sending everything off to my committee.

C) Oh, is this ever correct. Thanks to that outlier, not only did I have to trudge through re-typing a lot of obscure numbers throughout my methods section, the entire meaning of the results for any analyses related to that measure changed, and I spent an entire evening re-writing chunks of my results and discussion section and reformulating my
conclusions.

Therefore...

D) All of the above. As in all such multiple choice questions, this is the correct answer. As thrilled as I am to discover that my experiment just became more meaningful in its "marginally significant" way, and that the error was discovered before sending a draft to my committee (they might read it, and changing conclusions for the defense probably wouldn't go over well), I spent most of a day fixing something that was supposed to have been finished. I fully intend to irrationally blame the graph for all that frustration. Ignorance is bliss; knowledge is a re-write.

3,883

The thesis has successfully been trimmed to 3,883 words. The palindromic number wasn't intentional, although I would have tried for it if I'd been slightly over. I say "trimmed", but everything except the methods has been changed drastically. New organization, new arguments - the discussion is barely recognizable, which is just as well since I hated writing the discussion of the thesis.

The paper is most certainly better, making me think I might just have a chance of it being accepted. The thesis itself has become even more of an albatross...this long, huge thing that didn't even do a good job of getting the necessary points across. My own bound copy will still be given some pride of place on my bookshelf, but it is the shorter paper I will provide to anyone who wants to know what I did to get that diploma. Because I'd rather they actually read and be impressed by the research than heft and be impressed by a huge tome.

Hatchet Job

Back in college, I read a collection of short stories by a favorite author, Spider Robinson. In the introduction, he wrote about editing his first short story. Someone he respected told him to cut several thousand words from the "final" draft. He was sure there was nothing else to cut, he sweated over and mourned each deleted word, and he admitted in the end that the story was amazingly better.

Now, I find myself in the position of attempting to cut a 79-page master's thesis into a 6-page submission to the Proceedings of a conference. To be fair, that's a slight exaggeration: university guidelines request marshmallows (lots of white space, lots of pages with fluffy and sugary content) and conference guidelines request chocolate (ink-slathered pages of rich and condensed content). Still, it's nipping and tucking 15,250 words to roughly 4,500.

It's not that I'm attached to those 10,000+ words that are getting the delete button. Six weeks is just about enough time that I can stand to look at that document again after growing heartily sick of it during months of revisions, but not so much time that I've grown nostalgic about my first great academic work. In fact, I look at it with near-disparaging revisions. It would read so much better if I organized the results like so instead of so, this paragraph is too redundant, this sentence lacks elegance.

It's not that the 10,000+ words are necessary. The thesis requirements demanded inclusion every intention, step, and analysis in some specious attempt to validate my degree with hard work and a lengthy document. A conference submission, aspiring to be no more than a poster presentation, wants only slightly more meat on the bones than a mere abstract. Entire swaths of text, pages at a time, were cut for being unnecessary or unworthy. Failed analyses and non-significant "trends" can be ignored, tasks that added nothing in the end are removed from existence, citations added to bulk up the reference section can be adjusted to a single work by the same author.

It's just that it's a daunting task. After two days spent doing little else, I'm still at 6,700 words. The new angle, selected to make the results appear more meaningful and appealing, will require still more re-organization and re-writing of the discussion section, if not the introduction; this could take words off or pile them back on. My paper is on a yo-yo diet of cut and add, cut and paste.

In the darker moments, usually when scrolling through the now-26 pages in hopes of finding something else no one else would care about, I wonder whether it's at all worth it. I think of the day a few months from now when I receive the email telling me that the submission was very nice, thank you, but no one outside of the selection committee need be subjected to it. Will I be able to look back with a mature attitude, and say that my academic training wouldn't have been complete without such an intense and extreme revision process? Will I be willing to dust off the old analysis outputs yet again with an eye of trying toward publication in some journal? Or will I despair of having put this effort into a failed submission?

At the moment, I'm leaning toward seeing it as a learning experience regardless of the outcome. My explanations to various family members can now contain my concise but contentful descriptions of research past. It might even help convince them that my research is actually worthwhile. It's gone a surprisingly long way toward convincing me.