Conference Report

The NCUR meeting and associated activities (including a minor little adventure into San Francisco) have kept me really busy over the last few days. We're headed out early this afternoon, which means that we finally have a morning without any obligations. And, of course, there's a cold, steady rain falling after two days of spectacularly beautiful weather. So I'm blogging from the hotel while waiting for the shuttle to the airport.

The conference was a national meeting for undergraduates doing research, and the presentations included everything from art exhibitions to literature talks and science and engineering. The Union College contingent of 21 students was also a really diverse group, and I've seen a lot of interesting talks and posters in the past few days.

Unfortunately, the organization of the conference prevented me from seeing as many of the talks as I would've liked. Like most conferences, they provided participants with a program listing the many parallel sessions in different rooms, and listing the talks in those session. They also posted signs outside each room, listing the talks for each session. In a different order than the order given in the program.

Some of the session chairs did the sensible thing, and had the speakers present in the order given in the program, which all of the participants were carrying around with them. Others insisted on following the order posted at the individual rooms. The end result was, predictably, a complete catastrophe for those of us trying to attend mutliple talks in different sessions. There really wasn't any way to predict when a given student in a given session would be talking, without going to each of the rooms before the talks started, and asking the session chairs which order they would be using.

This situation marred what was otherwise a really nice conference. And the thing is, there's no earthly reason I can see for not having the times of the various talks listed in the program. Or, having printed the program and the individual schedules with different times, they should've at least set an official policy for all session chairs, so those of us who wanted to see multiple talks would be able to work out a schedule that would let us catch as many talks as possible. It's not like running a research conference is some arcane art that NCUR is pioneering-- there are hundreds of conferences every year, and this is the first national meeting I've been to that didn't manage to set the schedule of talks in advance.

Anyway, that's really the only problem I had with the meeting (and I'll be passing that complaint along to the organizers).Other than that, I was very favorably impressed with both the research being done by the students who presented their results, and the quality of the presentations by the students I saw speaking. Given all of the "kids these days" griping you hear in academic circles, it's really nice to be around such an impressive group of students. It's enough to give you hope for the future...