Milestone Moment: 1st Conference

As promised in the last Milestone Moment post, I fully intend on reporting every last detail of my very first conference. However, since going to my first conference essentially caused me to take about three days off regarding my responsibilities as a student and teaching assistant, I don't have a lot of time. Thus, this will be a somewhat condensed version of what was probably the best three days I've ever had...

As I've described before -- I'm currently working on graduate studies in cognitive psychology. Within the field of psychology, there are a number of sub-areas (cognitive, clinical, social, developmental, ect.) and many of these sub-areas have specialized conferences where fellow researchers and students in that area meet up and share their ideas and findings.

Perhaps the largest annual cognitive psychology conference took place this year in Minneapolis.

As a lowly first year grad student, I had the fortune of having second authorship on a project that was presented during a poster session at this conference. As a contributor on this project, I was given a coveted opportunity to attend the conference to help present this research, as well as go to talks and meet students and faculty members from other institutions.
This is a great way meet some of the best and brightest in this area of research (and ask them all the questions you can while you're there!), as well as meet other students who are working on projects similar to the work you're most interested in.

As soon as I knew that presenting in Minneapolis was an option, I leapt at the opportunity. However, I was not looking forward to paying for two 6 hour road trips of gas.

So I explored a new option....

It was only the price of one tank of gas to get to Minneapolis and back by Megabus (a luxurious double decker bus equip with reclining seats, individual temperature control, power outlets, and complementary wifi), and this way I didn't need to pay 20$ a night for city parking.

My bus left late Wednesday night at 11pm from Union Station in Chicago, and our journey took us through the night to a safe arrival in Minneapolis the next morning. I bought a small neck pillow thinking that I'd simply sleep on the bus on my way to Minneapolis.

but it was a little more like this

all in all, I got very few hours of sleep, and I'm not sure that I even finished a single REM cycle. But thankfully I was rested enough to realize that I definitely got dropped off by the bus ---in an interesting part of town....
And no, I don't have a picture. For very good reason, you're going to have to take my word for it.

Luckily a nice taxi driver picked me up right away, and whisked me off to my hotel, a grand total of 9 hours before I could check in.

Here's the part where I have to give a shout out to the most amazing hotel in the world. This week I stayed at the Millennium

The second I walked in, the overnight desk attendant welcomed me and asked if I had a reservation. As he was searching for my name in the computer he looked at my disheveled bus-sleeper appearance and felt the need to ask if I was "alright". I told him about the sleepless night on the bus.
Before I knew it, he was giving me a key to a hotel room (9 hours early!), and joking with me to find a bed and get some sleep before I passed out on the floor.

As soon as I got to the room, I barely had time to appreciate the complementary coffee or the beauty of the room's decor before completely passing out for the next four hours. I woke up to a groggy call from a fellow grad student who had just arrived to the conference. Luckily by then I'd had enough sleep to successfully comprehend the present ongoing activity (haha cognition joke...nevermind), and headed off to my first poster session.

The whole of Psychonomics is sort of a blur of posters, talks, and one on one meetings, but luckily I had my moleskin planner!

which has plenty of extra pages for notes for conversations with people at conferences like these (I filled about three pages with hasty chicken scratches that I am currently decoding and making sense of so I can put them into action).

Each day of the conference whizzed by and culminated in utter mental and physical exhaustion --mostly due to my chosen foot ware. But all in all, this conference (including my own poster presentation) went swimmingly, and was every opportunity that I could have hoped for.

 I even got to catch up with a great old friend!