Small world

I have a love hate relationship with conferences.

I love attending them, I hate submitting to them. I like presenting, I hate doing the work to prepare to present.

I also noticed that I often find myself feeling very alone while surrounded by 1000+ of my closest collegues.  I never seem to be on anyone's 'must check to see if they're attending list' or their 'must make sure to invite her to dinner with the group' list. I'm also pretty much never asked to collaborate or sit on panels without first instigating the idea myself and doing all the work to get other to agree to speak.

At the same time, I seem to have a great skill in being able to wander to various sessions, parties, happy hours, etc and strike up random conversation. It makes me question that perhaps I'm that person that seems to talk to everyone, but that everyone internally cringes when they see they are headed to conversation with the annoying person.

I spend a good deal of my time being concerned with why my classmates, or surrounding years, never ask me to collaborate or meet for drinks. Every once in a while, I recall that I don't actually like most of the people in my program. With the exception of Shorty, and a few others, I actually wonder how long until I can get away or how they got into the program in the first place.

I had a lot of thought about why it is that I've been attending this particular conference every year for 7 odd years, and why it continues to happen. About the same time I came to a decision, I was sitting in a session when one of the discussants made a related point. The discussant made the point that when people arrive to these conferences, many are overwhelmed and feel alone (really? I thought it was just me) As a result, many people that attend cling to those that they know (i.e., classmates). And, as a result of the clingage - no one really meets anyone else outside of that group.

Now, this is usually about the point I wonder why no one wants to cling with me...but this time I came to the realization, if I don't like them...and they may or may not like me...and the discussant recommends making a goal of meeting 3 new people per conference...then that's what I should be doing.

As many brilliant ideas go, it came along the second to last session on the last day of the conference.

Drat.

Not one to let go of a good idea, I did what networking people have probably been doing for hundreds of years. I took the business cards I had gotten from people that wanted a copy of my poster paper, emailed them individually, tried to add a little something about what we'd talked about, and then suggested that we keep in touch or consider a collaboration in the future. After that seemed to have gone well, and I got a coincidental reminder about updates from LinkedIn, I decided to 'stalk' not only the poster people but those cards I'd gotten throughout the conference as I talked to randoms.

Here's the weirdest part.

As I typed them into the system to link to them...I discovered that a handful of the 'randoms' I'd met had connections with a good number of other people I knew. Not just others I knew from the same program or a similar place, but really weird unexpected people in common. For example, one person was linked with someone from an old internship, first grad school, second grad school, classmate of old boyfriend in another state, and the head hunter I used when I was laid off from consluting.

In the end, I had a handful of new contacts in very diverse organizations, far flung states, and some potential collaborators. One potential collaborator even offered to let me use measures designed by her organization for free to conduct accademic research.

If only I wanted to do academic research.