I was chatting today with
one of our conference registrants about larger versus smaller conferences. I understand their concerns.
They were concerned because
our conference will have fewer than 1000 attenders. Big conferences offer the offer to meet LOTS
of people and by corollary, small conferences do not.
Clearly the reason that
there are lots of people at large conferences is because lots of people think
that bigger is better. Better to be
where all the people are.
Size Matters”.
In the medical laboratory
arena, many of the conferences of interest exceed 20,000 attendees. They are held in the few cities that facilities
to host these events. The conference
rooms are designed to hold thousands beyond thousands. While you may hear a “world famous” person
speak as a key-note, the reality is that you will see them only on a large television
screen.
More annoyingly for the
lesser sessions for people and presentations of interest, the room may hold a
couple hundred seats, but if a couple thousand have similar interest, the odds
are you either don’t get in, or you are stuffed at the back in the standing
room only. And as for connecting in the
evenings, most people will be scattered through 5 or 6 or 10 hotels. So you will probably eating lunches and
dinners with the same folks you attended with.
And here’s a reality check. Meeting with speakers and having an
opportunity to discuss some fine points, is NOT
going to happen. The reality is that
there probably will be sufficient time for 2 or 4 people to ask a question from
the floor, but odds are (by sheer numbers) is that your question will NOT be
one that gets addressed.
You might get a chance to
buy a copy of their presentation on tape (remember those?) or one disk, or by
streaming video off their conference website, but that you could have done at
home, without the cost of travel and attendance.
One thing that you can definitely
do in a large conference is get your poster on a poster board, along with a
couple other thousand. You might even
get few people to stop and read it, but probably not. Most of the traffic in the poster area is
other people with posters, who are checking out the competition, or are people
who are bored and doing the “poster wander” which means they look at the board,
and maybe stop for 7 seconds with a blank stare and walk on. Some will ask a banal or convoluted question
which is best translated is “your stuff is crap and my work is so much more
insightful”.
But on the positive side you
did get a citation for your abstract.
Smaller conferences are by
every measure better.
Take our upcoming Program
Office for Laboratory Quality Management Conference on “Medical Laboratory Quality
in Challenging Times. [see: http://conference.polqm.ca ]
The conference is being held
in Vancouver BC, but NOT in the mega conference centre. The Paetzold Education Centre is right sized
for a few hundred attendees. We may not have any former Presidents like
Bill or Barack, but the speakers, when it comes to laboratory quality are by
every measure world class and expertly share tons of interesting, relevant, and
skillfully crafted information. And you
can actually meet them and talk and discuss with them. Probably get a chance to take a selfie and
maybe get an autograph or two (!). Might
even find the opportunities of common interest to later pursue.
Rather than being part of an
audience, you actually have the opportunity to be part of the discussion and
debate.
And when you present your
poster, there is less competition and a lot more interest, and you still get
your citation.
When the smoke clears and
the conference is over, you have some new friends (maybe) some new colleagues
(probably) and a whole bunch of new insights and ideas (absolute certainty).
Register
Today.
