Conference update!

A few weeks ago I submitted an abstract to a conference that’s coming up. It’s an internally run conference that the hospital puts on every year for us to share our work with other labs. A lot of the stuff we do in the hospital is similar across labs so doing stuff like this helps everyone explore different collaborations that could be done or work that compliments other work. There’s a few things that need to happen now that I’ve been selected and there’s not a lot of time to do it, but what else is new?

I got notice that I was accepted a few days ago, but with all the stuff going on lately (yay!) I haven’t had a chance to announce this. In the big scheme of things (given all the stuff going on lately, again yay) it doesn’t feel like that big of a deal, but it’s still pretty exciting to win a slot for myself and to get a chance to practice presenting my work. There’s also (I think) awards given out, so who knows I could win something for what I present.

There was a long list of stuff I could’ve presented, but we wanted to go with something that was closer to being done than not, which limited my selection to something that wasn’t the super cool stuff I’ve been talking about (yesterday specifically). So instead I’ll be presenting the work we did for dual paper, which is currently being reviewed by our co-authors. I suspect that I’ll be hearing back from them in the next few weeks with some updates before we submit it. I’ve been warned that they are incredibly particular (now I see where hospital-PI gets it), so there will be changes.

In any case, since I was selected, I need to make a poster and get things together for my talk. Luckily, and I’m not trying to brag, I’m pretty good at poster making and the figures for this paper are really good looking. The work is pretty straightforward, but the findings are really cool and arguably very important for rehabilitation purposes (in the same vein as the usual stuff I publish basically). I’m excited to be able to share this at the conference and it will be great to get some feedback from others on the work since it will be a good way to figure out if there’s anything additional that should be expanded on in the paper.

For me, it’s sort of like a pre-review to see if the paper is clear enough for the general public and not just us. Because after you’ve done something for months it makes sense to you and the people you work with, but it may not make sense to others. You may have missed something you think is obvious, but in hindsight was only obvious because you’ve been working on it so long. That’s what happened with the last paper I published. It’s easily fixable, but it would be better to just fix it before submission rather than afterwards.

Plus there’s always room for improvement when you’re doing public speaking and I would like to improve. So now I just need to throw my poster together before the end of the week, get it to the organizers, get it printed, and in a few weeks it will be time!