This is a quick update from my trip to the 2019 APS March Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts at the beginning of March. I felt like my time overall was somewhat mixed, though positive on balance. On the negative side, my talk was lumped into a totally unrelated session on a Thursday afternoon, in which the talks weren't of interest to me and were generally not so well-delivered, the audience consisted almost entirely of the speakers who left after their own talks (and that included me after I saw what was happening, though I was grateful that some of my friends came for my talk), and the first talk which was supposed to be a 36 minute-long invited talk was canceled in the absence of the speaker, leading to a break during that time. Additionally, my advisor and I were busy preparing a paper unrelated to the work I would be presenting, and I've also been taking my time to figure out what I want to do after graduation, so I didn't prepare a schedule of talks to attend as well as I had in the previous two years. That said, on the positive side, I paced myself properly in attending talks, and I did appreciate having conversations with people from my department as well as people I knew in college about our work as well as future plans. I also had a lot of fun hanging out with friends from college as well as graduate school, and though I could have done a better job networking, I did try to reach out as much as I could. Finally, I had a great time skipping the last day of the conference and visiting MIT instead, where I got to catch up with professors from the physics department as well as other people whom I knew well in college (and met some people for the first time too); I felt like that was a far more useful & productive move. Next year, I hope to be able to present in a session more relevant to my current research interests, and to do a better job of tailoring my networking and session attendance to my future interests (which I hope will have solidified by then).
