13 Aug 2023 - Networker
Believe it or not, researchers are a social species. They are happy to go to the outside world to meet people and talk. It is one thing to sit in a lab, to close the door and to stick to a desk. It is another to have ideas mature by learning from others, and engaging in collaborations.
Events are an important component of research. They act as professional enablers to a socially active research ecosystem. Reasons to attend an event can be diverse, as is one’s financial / time / administrative ability to join these specialised meetings.
In this article, I share some thoughts on what it means for a researcher to attend an event.
Generally speaking events can be defined as any gatherings that aim at bringing together for a few days a bunch of people who share a common interest on a specific topic. Events fall under different types that usually depend on the audience (academics, industries, policy-makers, entrepreneurs, etc.), scope (from few attendees to thousands of participants), and objective, i.e., from expert discussions to showcase new advances to training programmes, or large scale discussions about today’s most pressing issues.
As researchers, we usually aim at attending events that are related to our area of research. Of course there is in practice no objection for a researcher in aircraft engineering to attend an event focusing on drug discovery for diabetes. However, that might not be the “best” way to invest time in the context of what we research (but again it might be that research on aircraft engineering can inform research on drug discovery for diabetes, and vice versa).
The type of events that we decide to join also very often depend on our career stage. Take the example of workshops. These are traditionally small-scale gatherings (in the order of few dozens of participants) that focus on very specific and highly specialised topics (e.g., the first international workshop on the use of mRNA-messenger type message passing for securing quantum communications – note that while I admit that this is a completely made up example, there might be ongoing work in that direction). A typical setting for workshops is that of PhDs that give PhD researchers the opportunity to talk about their work early on and get feedback from senior peers in the community.
Some events can be particularly large. See the thousand+ attendees-style conferences that are annual gatherings bringing together everyone interested in a specific area of innovation to track the latest developments.
Whatever their type, events are by nature specialised meetings that people attend to enrich their professional experience.
Motives for attendance can be quite diverse, ranging from a need to present what we do to the eagerness of getting to know what others do, or to simply pop in in order to strengthen existing or create new collaborations. Ultimately the reasons why we attend an event are heavily connected to our research career stage. A fresh PhD researcher will want to increase chances of exposure, while a long-term established academic will be honoured to share a long insightful experience with the community. Events are organised in such a way that anyone can maximise chances for social interactions. These interactions can be indirect through the delivery of a speech in front of an audience (also referred to as presentation) that is traditionally followed by a Q&A session. They are also encouraged more directly through coffee breaks, lunches and dinners, and so-called social activities. In fact events are the place to be for sustaining our network, but also to either meet old folks or create new contacts.
This is definitely a very subjective appreciation, but from my personal experience we are quite a number of good souls to find the experience of participating in events, well err, an experience. Imagine, you get to a venue. There are hundreds of people around, some pretty well-established in their respective domain. You go to the registration desk, are given a bunch of (useless?) goodies and a label that you need to carry throughout the next few days so that people know who you are. Assuming that you are the only representative from your lab/office, you might feel awkward forcing yourself to engage in random discussions. Having said that, researchers have generally a rather good ability for practice. The more events one attends, the more confident one is likely to become. In fact attendees who may seem over-confident might have actually worked a lot to get up to that level of eloquence in such settings. Nevertheless it can indeed be quite intimidating, especially when our personality does not match this type of things very well.
This is again quite subjective as it is really down to the perception of what work means to us. I really don’t see why one should be judgmental either against someone spending very long hours at work, or against someone who prefers working short but productive hours. A facet of being a researcher is that it should be easy, and more importantly encouraged, to be able to embrace the perspective that best matches our own way of working. There is something fundamentally creative about doing research, and as such, it seems to me quite contradictory to set some pre-defined patterns on how one should spend time to achieve the ultimate goal of making knowledge advance. On that account I believe we should stop this form of hypocrisy that stipulates that attending an event is not about enjoying some good time. To anticipate any attack, let me clarify my argument here: yes, attending an event is about work. The prime objective is and should always be to professionally benefit from leaving work for a few days (and also from paying bloody expensive registration fees…) to get our perspectives exposed and enriched. So if one’s objective is to get a visa to a fairy place without any intention to show one’s face in the event, there is clearly something broken in the motives. Now events constitute a chance to travel and see something different, which is a non-negligible advantage of being a researcher. No one is going to be fully attentive to everything going on during the event (days can be quite packed), so no one should feel obliged to attend everything. Getting out and feeling the vibe of the local place can also participate in feeding our creativity.
The ongoing covid-19 pandemic has been significantly influencing the way we work as researchers. Among the different things that have been impaired by the situation, the opportunity to physically attend events constitutes a very obvious example. The community rapidly reacted by moving a large number of events to online, virtual settings., which is also likely to have longer term consequences on how we join these events in the years to come. On one hand online settings tend to make attendance more convenient. It is not only more affordable, it is also easier for the participants to access and arrange. On the other hand, it displaces social interactions, which in my opinion, is a crucial component in the motives behind travelling to participate in meetings, conferences, or symposiums. It is yet to be demonstrated whether virtual gatherings provide the same means as physical meetings for creating these interactions. There is certainly space for these types of events to develop further. Future prospects might seriously impair our ability to easily travel in the years to come, and online events do offer a good alternative. In addition, they provide an opportunity for accessing at limited costs a wider spectrum of discussions, which can be highly valuable for informing our research. In addition, they may help establish new collaborative models by which research can operate by facilitating online interactions and resource (i.e., competence) consolidation. Like so many things, it is likely that the solution to future events will come in the form of hybrid formats, where one would be able to navigate between physical and online settings. Whatever the future of these events will be, let’s not forget that the social aspect is a true driver to fulfilling a research based on trust, exchanges, and possible professional friendship.
I remember my first participation at a research-related event. It was a small PhD workshop that was organised to give young researchers in my field the chance to interact with people in the community. It was all excitement at the time: meeting a bunch of people; traveling with my lab mates; exposing my work in front of a (critical) audience. That was all new to me. Time has passed since then, and I often end up weighing today the pros and cons of registering to an event. I will need to arrange the trip. I will be away from home for a few days. I will need to arrange all the rest around. I did not give these things much thought in my younger research years. Our job as researchers strives for a constant balance between many responsibilities. Each of them takes time and necessitates commitment. Events are crucial to sustaining our communication efforts. They are essential to learn and be exposed. They are essential to interact with the outside world. So it is definitely needed to accommodate times for attending events. It is also a training field for practicing skills that are often not emphasized enough for research: talking, networking and meeting. It is up to our personality to decide which and how many events we can honestly cover a year. Up to what we also expect in our research career. There is no typical research profile. Research is a set of things, up to us to decide where we put our priorities.