Final post about my travels. To end any possible confusion, I have been back in NZ 2 weeks now, but not spending lots of time on blogging.
I wasn’t looking much forward to this conference, as it features too many enzyme activities, rRNA and other biological mysteries for me. Also I wanted to finally present something beyond “preliminary data” but as you know I still didn’t have many usable data. I found out they put my talk in a plenary session where EVERYBODY in the conference would be (unless they really hated me and would sneak out to have coffee instead). Which in principle was great, but not when you don’t have a great talk. So, pressure. With drunken construction workers and backpackers singing downstairs and doused in the decaying-sock-stench of my hostelroom I finetuned the presentation from the previous conference and hoped for the best.
In Prague I had bought this cute new pink blouse for the talk, but it was absolutely freezing in the “conference ballroom” so I also put on my woolen socks, some thermo underwear layers, a scarf and a jacket. I could have presented in my old blouse or in my pajamas for that matter, as I probably represented more a snowman than a pink lady scientist (no, not true, the jacket and scarf were nice enough, and I had washed my pants).
But the talk went swimmingly! Perhaps it really helped I had presented this a month before. I was totally in the flow and felt really good about it. And many people later came up to me and congratulated me on the talk. Some people I know went into details of how powerful and catchy I had presented the controversial data, other people told me how people I cited had gone “Pfffooooooh!” during some specific slides, and random strangers would say “I know nothing of your topic, but I loved your talk”. Wow, wow wow wow! Take that Ian! So much for your “Hmm I would do it differently” upon seeing my practice talk. Talking to people who know Ian or who know of Ian at these conferences made me aware that he is smart and everything, but not very tactical. He would just have pissed people off with his talk, whereas I had constructive chats with the scientists whose work I elegantly blew to pieces…
It was also weird that suddenly after Tuesday morning everybody knew who I was. Usually you wave your name card at someone when you start to talk, but now everybody was like “Oh, Nina! I saw your talk”.
Socially I made friends with the New Zealand crowd. I knew half of them, the other half was new. As usual there was only 1 real kiwi. I also met some key Aussie researchers and some Europeans I had had my eyes on for a while already. In fact after my talk one of the gurus of my line of work in Sweden came up to me and told me how excited he was about this project. How motivating to finally be the one approached by others, instead of waiting in line for hours. Although I also did that. I even got tackled while running to the organizing prof who was finally free, someone else sneaked up on him from behind his poster and I nearly fell on my face. Nice.
Besides the conference centre, the train and the mindblowingly awful hostel I didn’t really see anything of Perth itself. Oh, well, a restaurant. One afternoon though we went on an excursion to a wildlife park, a chocolate factory, a winery and a brewery. It was called a scientific excursion, but that was clearly not the focus. We were all satisfied here in terms of Australian wildlife.
The conference was very successful and I felt proud of my talk and that I succeeded in talking to all people I wanted to.
