Last week, I was the at the 30th tRNA conference in Greece. The great food and the soft breeze of the Mediterranean made me lazy to think beyond tRNA business; which is still my main interest nevertheless. Once I landed in Czechia, it came to my mind how much of an experience is a conference. This is my 5th conference and I already can see that such meetings are beyond being a series of talks. In relatively short period of time, it brings together excitement, ambition, uncertainty, and competition of an entire field. In a tRNA conference, or any conference, one small molecule becomes a gateway for protein translation, evolution, disease, medicine, and the origins and plasticity of the genetic code.
What could you gain from a conference in your PhD?
A PhD usually focuses on a narrow question or a discrete gap in knowledge that needs to be filled up. The next idea and the next experiment are often the things that occupy a student’s mind. In contrast, a conference opens up all different possibilities and methods to deal with questions. It also makes the student feel that his project is a part of a larger intellectual effort to tackle problems in the field.
A conference also helps testing the judgment of students. The discussions with senior scientists, while this might be a bit disappointing, can help distinguish a genuine mechanistic problem from an attractive but superficial experiment. Disagreement is especially useful: it identifies the assumptions that deserve testing. But this also have its pros, such discussions sometimes help in sharpening the ideas and avoiding going in the wrong direction for a limited working period of a PhD.
Networking in a conference is perhaps one of the most important aspects. The poster/talk and the discussions with other scientists help the student “become seen”. For people looking to stay in academia after their PhD, these interactions could lead to their next job. Furthermore, the interaction with other scientists helps the student understand how minds, other than his supervisors’, approach the same problem; as I think no scientist has exactly the same views on same things as other scientists. Beyond senior researches, and I mean no offense to them, the other PhD students and post-docs in the conference will be the student’s future collaborators or competitors in 10 to 20 years. Thus, it is rather essential to build early connection with these people also.
What does a conference talk about the institution of science?
In my opinion, a conference is the playground of Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm. There, the paradigm is rather crystal clear and not a ghost of unwritten rules sensed through stretches of weeks of reading articles. In a conference, it becomes established, in just one session, what is considered acceptable by the field as enough evidence and what are the “canonical” approaches to address a certain question. Say a tRNA modification session, the field would express the unwritten rules of the paradigm by showing that mass spectrometry is the leading technique to detect modifications. It is not anymore APM gels (say for thiolation) and that the rise of nanopore detection of modifications is already tilting what is accepted toward the latter. In addition to the unwritten rules, the conference and the shared struggles to solve a certain problem make the anomaly in the paradigm more pronounced and, subsequently, pushes toward a paradigm shift.
Although scientific conferences are meant to collegial, but they are not free of competition. Different groups might be working on closely related questions. People want to publish first, get their work into stronger journals, secure funding, and establish an identity to be able to keep going. The opposite of the path mentioned in the last sentence is usually lots of frustration and lost effort. The tensions in conferences are high and competing groups tend to hide their work or briefly hint to it until its in press and rather secured. The entire process can sharpen ideas and accelerate progress, but it can also make early career researchers feel that they must rush toward whatever is fashionable.
To sum up, a conference is certainly an essential experience for a student as it teaches him/her things that day-to-day work in the lab does not. It also gives them first-hand experience on how science works on larger scale and how the intellectual landscape is shaped beyond their group/institute.
Best regards,
Fadel
PS: I was lying. The vine leaves were the most important experience in the conference.
