Spending your emotions wisely

Recently, it seemed like every conversation I had was about how hard it is to get grants and how little money there is for science. At SfN this year it was all I talked about. But the awesome conference that I’m at now is completely shifting that. It is great to be here in so many ways:

First, I get to sleep and relax. Last night I decided not to go out and drink, but to go back to my hotel room at 11 and sleep. I slept in a whole stretch to the next morning. That hadn’t happened in 2 years and it was great. Also, there is some time to relax and I just spend an hour and a half at the pool reading a book. Anyone who has a kid realizes that that too is something that only happens every 2 years or less. 

Also scientifically this meeting is great. There are many good speakers and sessions, but what this conference also makes me realize is that I am someone who works in a certain field and knows things. For example, I know who the people in my field are and what they do. I realize what the questions are that the field has at the moment and I’m starting to think of ways to answer those. But also, other people are starting to know who I am. Yesterday, the most awesome science-thing ever happened, where I was talking to someone I hadn’t met before and at some point this person realized that ze was familiar with my graduate work. But not only that, my graduate work had “inspired the work that ze was doing now” (hir words). OMG this still makes me so excited and happy!

This meeting is also really interesting because there are so many senior scientists who show genuine interest and share advice. Not only did I get assigned two mentors because I won a travel award but I have also been talking to numerous other senior scientists. Talking to them does sometimes make me wonder if I’ll be able to pull it off to be a rock-star scientist when I grow up. The morning I left for this meeting I kind of broke down under the pressure of writing a paper and a grant in the same month, and worrying about funding situations and about Dr. BrownEyes’ paper and grant and on top of that trying to clean the house and do laundry in the 2 hours I had before leaving for this conference after a pretty crappy night of sleep. I cried and said I couldn’t take it anymore. And then I heard all these stories about women whose kids got sick or who went through the trouble of adopting a child from a far-away country. Would I be able to take anymore load on top of this? I don’t even dare to think about what would happen when BlueEyes would get sick in times like these when it is so busy. 

And that brings me to the title of this post. Because at the women’s lunch at this meeting the speaker was talking about how you can only use your emotional capacity once in a day. There is only so much energy you can spend on emotions, that you’d better spend it wisely, she said. So her advice was to use your analytical scientific brain to determine whether something is word worrying about, and if not, stop worrying about it immediately. 

So I am going to walk in the sun and spend my emotional capacity on being happy about all this exciting science, instead of on worrying about funding rates of such and such percentage!! And did I mention how glad I am again to spend time with people I met on twitter?!

Introduce people to each other!

My most awkward experience at the Society for Neuroscience meeting was the following: I was checking out posters and walked into one of our collaborators. I wanted to have his input on my work so I showed him some of my data and asked him what he thought. Before he had finished another person from the same field showed up. He’s a friend of the collaborator, but I also know him because he was at my old university. So we talked for a bit about how things were going, but I was still sort of waiting for our collaborator to finish what he had to say about my data. Next, another big shot in the field showed up and said hi to the two men I was talking to. They slapped each other on the back and started talking. I was kind of waiting for either the collaborator or the guy from my old university to introduce me but that didn’t happen. And I now realize that I should just have introduced myself, but they kept talking and I didn’t really know when to say something so in the end I said nothing. I was still kind of hoping to finish the conversation with the collaborator, but after some time it felt like I was obviously not part of the conversation anymore. I excused myself, left and kept feeling pretty awkward and regretted that I hadn’t said anything. 

So the point of this story is that it’s a small gesture to introduce people to each other, but that it makes a huge difference in how you make people feel. I’m glad that my advisor is really good at this and has introduced me to a lot of people he knows in science, and I try to always introduce people to each other too, because it just sucks to feel so left out.

To a conference in baby-detach mode

At last year’s SfN BlueEyes was still very little and portable, so I stuck him in a wrap and brought him with me on Saturday and Sunday. This year’s SfN is going to be the first time that I’ll be away from him for 5 (FIVE!!) nights. I don’t think I’ve ever had more ambivalent feelings about anything. On one hand I’m super excited to go to SfN, travel by myself without having to watch and entertain BlueEyes, see friends and science and be able to hang out, but on the other hand the idea of missing him is almost physically painful. And then there’s my worry whether Dr. BrownEyes is going to be okay taking care of BlueEyes by himself for five nights. At least the freezer is full of milk so I’m pretty sure they will be fine.

So, I’m very excited to go to SfN, mainly because it is in New Orleans this year. The last time that happened was just before I started as a graduate student, and the whole time in grad school I kept hearing all these awesome stories about SfN in NOLA, as the city is lovingly called. Back in grad school, going to SfN was a very big deal, first because it was so far away for us, and thus much more expensive to go, but also because my advisor only allowed us to go if we could present data from a paper that was already submitted somewhere, because he was always afraid we would get scooped at SfN.

So what else do you need to know? Doc Becca and Scicurious have excellent posts with tips for surviving SfN so I’m only going to add to that that what I usually do at SfN when I don’t know where to go is to stroll around the posters in the hopes of meeting people I know or unexpectedly seeing posters I’m interested in.

Also, RXNM has four posts about where to eat in NOLA, go check it out!

And my fellow blogger and electrophysiologist TheCellularScale is one of SfN’s neurobloggers, so go read there to hear all about the latest neuroscience.

And last but not least, this year is going to be my first time going to SfNBANTER!