GLBIO 2012 Wrap-Up: I am not Tony Stark

Science conferences as I want them to be.

GLBIO 2012 has come and gone. I came, I ate the food my registration fees paid for, I presented. In case you're curious, the slides and relevant materials I presented are here.

And here is what I learned:

Tutorials need to go easy on figures and formulas. Audience retention was terrible in the tutorials I witnessed, and I suspect part of it was due to presenters translating a paper to Powerpoint too literally. Bioinformatics is a very broad discipline; it's likely that the only person in the audience that understands enough about your paper to follow a presentation on it is you.

Your presentation needs a punchline. Mine, sadly, didn't have one. I spent an hour discussing the ins and outs of a visualization workflow, only to have my example of that workflow... not be spectacular. Not that I think I needed a pyrotechnics display, but having a definite conclusion instead of just stopping dead and thanking your sponsors would have been the icing on the cake.

Pictured: Not the end of my tutorial.

Be open to criticism. I swear some people go to presentations just to be assholes. There's nothing worse than listening to two eggheads prattle on about the third variable someone chose in part 4 of their 18 part analysis for ten minutes. However, sometimes criticism comes from a place of shared interest, which means you meet the coolest people by listening to what they have to say.