I haven’t written in a while due to my trip to the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting. At the meeting I got to present my research at the Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience poster session, which was a great chance to practice talking about what I do with people of various scientific backgrounds, and hopefully make a good impression with the faculty who were there. I was fairly pleased with how the poster session went, and I feel much more comfortable describing my research spur of the moment now that I’ve gone through it with at least 10 different people coming from different backgrounds and wanting different levels of detail. At the poster session, someone also mentioned an online undergraduate journal that is looking for both contributors and people for the review board, so I am thinking I will apply for a review board position. It seems like a good way to keep up with what other people my age are working on, and can’t hurt my CV, but mostly it just sounds fun.

One other exciting part of the conference was the social I went to. As a satellite event to the main meeting, there was a social held for people doing research similar to mine. My research advisor and a former lab-mate were both attending, and I decided that it would be a good chance to meet people who might have leads on jobs (and to have fun with people who are as geeky as I am). I have to say, socializing with people I don’t know is not my strong point. I felt really awkward for the first 15 minutes or so, since I didn’t want to cling to my professor or friend and prevent them from having a good time, and I felt really shy about just walking up to random people and introducing myself, especially since it seemed like everyone else already knew each other.

Eventually I realized that this was not the best way of thinking of things, so I found a woman who was standing alone and chatted with her about her experiences at grad school so far. After that I felt more comfortable approaching people and really started to enjoy asking people about where they worked, what kind of research they did, and mentioning that I’m looking for a position as a lab tech. Nobody mentioned positions that were confirmed to be open, but I did get two ideas of labs that may be in need of a lab tech (depending on grants, and whether the position is still open.) They’re not “ideal” in that one is in Portland and the other is in LA, and I am still hoping to end up in Seattle, but Portland is fairly close, and there are a number of labs I plan to look into there. The lab in LA is run by a primary investigator I’ve met (she gave a lecture on campus last year) and enjoyed talking to, and I’ve met several of her grad students, so the lab environment would definitely be pleasant.

Overall, the meeting was both fun, and a good opportunity to learn about potential jobs and practice interpersonal skills with people outside my immediate field. I’m looking forward to contacting the folks that were suggested to me.