Well, the poster session has been over for about an hour now. But I’m just now getting around to sitting down and taking a breather. I ended up walking around and looking at the other sessions only to come back and find my professor at my poster with two other profs who are pretty much the renowned experts in the field that I am researching. They had some good insights into my research model and I guess I’m sorta looking forward to going back now and starting on these things.

The poster session itself was pretty good. Again, I didn’t know what to expect and so I can’t say it was super awesome or super-not. I will say though that for the first 30 minutes I just kinda stood there while people just passed by my poster. At first I thought that maybe something in my poster wasn’t unclear, or perhaps people just weren’t interested. Part of it I realize was that I needed to engage people as they stopped by and perused my poster. I found that if I just greeted them or asked them if they had any questions, they were would open up very much at that point. So after the first 30 minutes I started doing that and I got into a few interesting discussions with some people. However, I did not get as many visitors to my posters as the people around me and I wondered about that as I was standing by myself. I realized that most of the people around me didn’t have these really really great research topics… but rather, they were all young attractive females!

This is how I saw it: If you are an introverted biomechanics researcher, you are probably overwhelmed by even the small number of ladies that are present at this conference. You may want to talk to some of them but hey, you’re introverted so really you think that you have no business talking to these ladies. However, the poster session gives everyone an excuse to go up to them and strike up conversation (albeit, regarding research). I did notice that there were some guys that would stay in front of a single poster for about 30 minutes just talking to the female researcher. And yes, it did make me chuckle to myself once or twice. If only these guys knew that you could probably approach the ladies and ask them about stuff other than research; that would be okay. Then again, these guys probably didn’t watch “Hitch” just a few days ago.