Gave my first conferance talk!

 Life has been pretty stressful last week, with a barrage of unproductive hours at research and a looming conference presentation on the weekend, I was in for a swell. The conference was on systems biology at UCLA and I was supposed to give a talk on my optimal crawling work. The way I registered for this talk was funny. Initially, Mattia thought he would give a talk at this conference but he applied to the student portal! after he knew that he messed up, he asked me to present in his place. The presentation was limited to a single slide and for 2 mn, Seems pretty short doesn't it? Not short enough to not mess up! 

Given my particularly poor showing at the presentation I did for the open house, I decided that I would prepare very well for this conference talk. So I started making the slide on Monday and finalized it by Wednesday, by which Mattia decided that I should present my work on the chick embryo rather than the crawling work. Given that Wednesday was the deadline to submit the presentation, we asked the conference organizers to grant us some leeway to submit it on Friday. Mattia helped me a lot in making the presentation and we finished the PPT and sent it a day before the conference. I actually got down to writing my entire presentation down and spent some time just memorizing it. I also did some practice sessions with Mattia, and he gave some really good feedback on it.

One realization that I had while making presentations with Mattia was that he knew how to pitch ideas and make presentations. He was a consultant in a professor's disguise! When I initially got down to make the PPT I thought that I had nothing to present and my work was shallow, but when he went and pitched my work to me, It was amazing! 

I left the office early on Friday as my friend, a math Ph.D. in UCSD, was hosting a potluck for Ugadi for which I was invited. Since we had to make something for the potluck the three Indians in my Ph.D. physics batch got together and decided to make kheer. We went and bought some stuff from ralphs and got down to making it. Sadly, it didn't turn out that well. The kheer was too solid and not that sweet. We also baked some brownies and that turned out okay at least something. Sigh.

I went to the party and had fun there, but I had to leave early since the drive to LA was 2 hours and the conference started at 9. Mattia was driving and we started from here at 6: 20 am. Sleep that night wasn't all that good, as it usually happens for me before a big day, it happened in all my entrance examinations and placement day at IIT. I wore the suit to the conference and debated with my best friend don on whether I should wear my sneakers or formal shoes with it, finally deciding on the formal.

Sleep-deprived, we ended up at UCLA at 8: 30 in the morning, grabbed some breakfast from a Starbucks nearby, and went inside the conference hall. There I truly discovered the power of coffee, there was a ton of it, and it kept me awake all throughout the day. It was legalized steroids for your brain!. My presentation was at the end which meant I was practicing my talk in my mind all through the day and was not paying attention to the other talks by the faculty. Most of the talks were very different from my field and I couldn't care less, but some were very interesting rehashing my undergrad days taking the systems biology course. My presentation was due and I killed it! Maybe because it is a natural state of things? (Should have done a control experiment)  

After the talk, a couple of people came up to me and said that they like the talk and asked me more about my work, which was fun. They were serving alcohol around that time and I started drinking, which helped me relax a bit more and everything became all the merrier!

The conference ended with the famous "Guitar talk" by Uri Alon, where he gave a talk on the emotional side of research and the approach and realities of science which was very illuminating. We left the place and went drinking in downtown LA, which is a shady place to be. We ended up in a rooftop bar which was extremely posh, and we had a fun time! We discussed science, approach to life, and a whole lot of other things. 

Even though I was drunk by then, Mattia wasn't and he drove me back to San Diego. We reached here at midnight and I was super glad that we reached safely given the alcohol content in his bloodstream.

Totally it was a fun first conference experience! There is another one that I am going to on April 21st, where I will be presenting my fluid separation work. Keep tabs on this blog to know more about how it goes down at that conference.