An Insider's View of the AGU Fall Meeting

This week over 11,000 geophysicists from around the world are attending the 2005 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in San Francisco. It is the largest yearly gathering of scientists in the earth and space sciences. But what is it really like to go to one of these conferences? Typically, it is a week filled with talks and daily poster sessions, which are the academic equivalent of a commercial (most talks are only 12 minutes long) and putting your homework up on the refrigerator for all to see. But the real excitement happens between the talks and in the hallways as colleagues and competitors mingle and gossip like they're at a family reunion. Since most scientists follow a strict and narrow path from graduate school onward, it's unlikely that you're going to see people who are new to the field unless they're graduate (or more rarely undergraduate) students. And since graduate students are the intellectual children of their advisors, almost everyone is related through an intellectual family tree, which makes many of the people there either your cousins, aunts, uncles, or grandfathers (your advisors' advisors). Yes, it can be very incestuous. You can pick out the job hunters, administrators, and administrator-wannabes by their business suits, while tenured professors and some graduate students tend to go casual. Parties and invitation-only events fill up the evenings, depending on your affiliation with various departments and research groups, such as the Lamont, Scripps, and WHOI parties and the ever popular RIDGE Smoker. The most memorable events are not necessarily the posters or talks, but meeting famous scientists you've only read about, watching your thesis advisor get drunk and swap war stories with his old grad school cronies (who are now department chairs and academy members), or catching the rumor about so-and-so professor and the grad student who have been standing a little too close to each other around the buffet table all night. It is the place to see and be seen. Then, when it's all over, we pack up our slides, roll up our posters, and get ready to do it again next year.