As the second day of BPS2026 comes to an end, I wanted to write about how the meeting has gone so far. It has been an exciting and diverse lineup of scientific sessions, with several valuable career development seminars for young scientists scheduled throughout the day. I have run into a few unexpected and several expected familiar faces, which has been one of my biggest highlights so far.
About a week before the meeting, I had carefully looked through all the session titles and abstracts and bookmarked all the talks I wanted to attend. I knew exactly all the sessions I wanted to attend, or at least I thought so. But as with any scientific meeting of this scale, there were plenty of overlapping sessions that all looked equally interesting. So at 3 AM on Friday, wide awake thanks to my circadian rhythm stuck in EST, I found myself reworking my schedule to minimize conflicts and build an efficient schedule.
On the first morning, when I reached the convention center, I started by figuring out where all the rooms were located. Some of the consecutive sessions on my schedule were nearly a 10-minute walk apart, which I had not accounted for earlier (did I not learn anything from my previous big conference attendance?). I dove straight into the day and did my best to keep up with my agenda. By late afternoon, I had begun to realize that I was sacrificing effectiveness for efficiency (again, did I not learn anything from my previous big conference attendance?). I was barely giving myself time to reflect on each talk, and more importantly, I wasn't giving myself time to pause and chat with the people around me - and we all know that this is the best parts of these meetings!
So on my second day (Sunday), I changed how I planned my day.
1. I scheduled intentional breaks in between sessions and used that time to reflect on the key takeaways from each talk.
2. I approached people and initiated conversations. As an introvert, this is one of the hardest things for me, but it turned out to be incredibly rewarding to make genuine connections with fellow scientists, and Sunday was full of great connections!
3. I gave myself permission to exit a talk if I felt I was no longer benefiting from being there. This can be tricky. I tend to worry about missing that one exciting result that would inspire my next big idea, or in a career development workshop, I always hope that there would be some secret trick reveal, if only I could stay till the end. But sometimes the best choice is to move on.
4. Finally, I accepted that no matter how well I planned, I would still end up missing parts of the meeting that I wanted to attend, and that is okay. When I couldn’t make it to a talk I wanted to attend, I made a note of the speaker's name so I could visit their poster later. If I (luckily) ran into them in the lobby, I told them I was sorry to miss their session due to schedule conflicts, and that I would love to stay in touch and follow their research.
This isn’t so much advice as it is an overview of what's working for me so far. If you also tend to overschedule yourself at conferences, but have found ways to manage your schedules and sanity, let's talk! Find me on LinkedIn, or if you see me rushing from Esplanade 156 to room 301 and then back to 156 within 20 minutes, please feel free to stop me and remind me to slow down!