The perils of conference dining
Herding scientists at a meeting is a lot like herding cats
The most common exchange at any conference is as follows:
‘Hey! How are you?’
‘Great. I’m starving by the way; I ate one bagel eight hours ago.’
The main chemistry conferences in the world, the American Chemical Society annual meetings and European Chemical Society congress, are galactic in scale. They spill across multiple conference centres and into adjacent four-star hotels. Tens of thousands of scientists strut along endless corridors, trying to look important. First-time attendees can only clutch their lanyards and stare from the side lines in wonder. With the scramble of attending back-to-back parallel sessions crammed into those few precious days – and the adrenaline jitters that comes from job-hunting, networking or meeting your idols – daytime eating becomes a low priority.