Recently the biggest geoscience conference, the EGU General Assembly, took place in Vienna. This year 18,646 attended in person and another 2,338 people joined online (Hot tip: online attendance is free for Bachelor and Master students;). Now, this is an immense number of people and with 1,102 sessions on all imaginable topics scheduling and prioritizing can be a nightmare. However, it also means there is bound to be a session that fits your interests very well and there are loads of possibilities to get interdisciplinary viewpoints.
The General Assembly is also a huge opportunity for networking. But especially for ECRs who are attending EGU for the first time, maybe haven’t been to many other conferences and don’t already have a large, established network it can also be very challenging and overwhelming.
To make it a little bit easier, we (APECS Germany) and APECS Austria organized an interdisciplinary splinter meeting as a networking event for polar ECRs. Our advertisement seemed to have worked very well, because more than 50 ECRs joined us. After a short introduction to our goals and activities we started off with some icebreaker activities to get everyone to move and mix a bit. How would you position yourself along a gradient to answer some of these questions?
- How big is your research subject?
- How much fieldwork is enough fieldwork?
- How many conferences have you been to?
Here we learned that our community works on topics ranging from the scale of an atom to the Antarctic ice sheet and that most people would like to do more fieldwork than they are doing. The last question showed quite a lot of spread between people attending their first conference ever and others who had been to so many they didn’t count. Now everyone knew who they could bombard with questions later on. And although many might find speed dating a bit cheesy it worked remarkably well and lead to much conversation.
But APECS Austria and Germany are not the only APECS national councils and we are really happy for contributions by the UK Polar Network, APECS Luxembourg and APECS Bulgaria. Furthermore, we invited everyone to come to the front for a short pitch of their presentations. After we, the organizing team, pitched our contributions more and more followed suit and in total roughly 15 people advertised their talk, poster, the formation of a new APECS national council (attention everyone from or affiliated with Finland) or other events at EGU, like for example the pride events at EGU. For the last 30 minutes we broke out the cookies and used the space to give everyone more time to connect with people they just met there or to discuss the conference contributions they pitched.
Thanks a ton for so many people attending our networking event and for all of the contributions by other APECS national councils and individuals who pitched their presentations.
But the APECS networking event is not the only place at EGU where you can meet new people or get help/ideas for your time at the EGU. Here are a few more ideas how to get the most out of EGU based on our experiences:
- EGU is offering a mentoring program for which you can sign up in the registration form (both for mentees and mentors). A first or second time attendee will be paired with a more senior scientist (who attended EGU 3 or more times) with similar topics of interest (how well it works depends on how many people sign up). As a mentee you then have someone who can introduce you to new people, help with general questions and give tips for planning your program. Personally, it has been a great experience for me being a mentee at my first EGU and I would highly recommend it.
- In the EGU program there are loads of networking opportunities for ECRs where you can meet new people (and they sometimes offer free food). These events can be interdisciplinary or organized by the ECR representative of a division.
- It can be really hard to speak to people you don’t know yet. I find the easiest way is to ask someone you already know to introduce you to people they know but you would like to get to know. Everyone I have met has been genuinely happy to do so and it makes the whole experience much less stressful. But even if your colleague maybe also doesn’t know the person you’d like to meet, it can help a lot to go together for mutual support.
- Finally, the best thing is to come prepared. If you haven’t been to EGU before, talk to friends or colleagues who have and get an impression and tips. Then make sure you know what your goal for each day is and have an overview of what sessions you want to attend. Here you can find some more resources to prepare for your next conference.
See you next year in Vienna!
