Conference Crashing - a guide

Scientific conferences may, on the whole, be fairly boring, but one must be aware that from 4pm to 6pm most conferences provide delegates with free booze and food as an incentive to stick around and look at the posters after a gruelling day of sitting still and listening to boring talks. This is the prime crashing time.

It is helpful to have the inside running on what conferences are happening in your vicinity. In order to keep on top of this, I recommend you marry an academic.

On Thursday afternoon we travelled to Frankfurt to 'attend' the 9th Kimberlite Conference. As rocks go, Kimberlites are fairly rare, obscure even, but since they host most of the world's diamonds, a conference discussing the latest research is bound to attract impressive sponsorship dollars.

Sponsorship dollars = lots of beer.

Hooray.

Step 1 - ensure you blend in, again your academic husband (TM) will prove very useful at this point - if you can encourage him to grow a beard, all the better.

Step 2 - head straight for the bar, this will ensure that you look like a conference delegate.

Step 3 - browse the posters. You will only be able to stand this for 20 minutes before crimes against good graphic design become too much for you to handle. Whoever thought that an A0 poster with a thesis printed on it in 10 point font was an effective means of communication has a lot to answer for.

Step 4 - find some friends. Ideally these will be actual people that you know and like, but this is not essential. Your academic husband (TM) will be able to chat to anyone on any number of not particularly interesting subjects.

Step 5 - once the bar is closed and you have been physically removed from the venue, gather together a posse and head out for dinner.

Congratulations, you are now officially a conference interloper.

Your next mission, should you choose to accept it is the 'conference dinner' - a higher degree of difficulty, but with a higher payoff - dinner and drinks! Be warned this is a high risk strategy. You may get stuck at a table with some of the most boring people imaginable.

As you can see from this post, my 'inner student' is strong and is often unsupervised.