First conference talk

On Monday I gave my first talk at a conference: the meeting of The Electrochemical Society.

On Thursday the four students presenting talks gave practice talks at our group meeting, and Martin and other group members offered suggestions for improvements.  I think that in the case of mine, about half of the suggestions were things I also noticed myself when giving the talk to an audience; I was happy to find that others agreed with me.

On Sunday I made the changes, and I headed over to the convention center (the conference was in Boston) nice and early on Monday to register and see (most of) the morning session's talks.

I was very happy with the placement of my talk: second in the session between morning tea and lunch.  The crowd was fairly decent - it's hard to estimate, but perhaps close to 100 people?  I gave my talk on "Electrochemical Intercalation in a Polydisperse Collection of Active Particles", and was quite happy with it.  It wasn't as good as my Honours talk in 2008, by which I judge my talks, but good enough.  I thought I was going under time (20 minutes), but there was only time for one question at the end, so apparently not.  Knowing that I used almost my full time, I now wish I had been just a little shorter in order to take another couple of questions, because that's how I see what the audience thinks of my presentation.

A couple of group members mentioned that they liked the changes I made, so overall I was satisfied.

During the long lunch break, I chatted with a student from Queensland University of Technology, about both science and life in Australia/US.  We then joined the rest of our groups and a couple of other colleagues for lunch at No Name, a seafood restaurant.  The food was quite decent: plain, but I feel that's typical for seafood.

Two other group members gave talks in the afternoon, and I think people found them interesting, though perhaps our work is enough ahead of the field to be slightly controversial.  There were a few other interesting talks - as usual, I found that only a small fraction were particularly relevant to me, but it's still interesting to see what is going on in the broader field.

Monday evening: a well-earned rest!