The Observer's Guide to March Meeting
How to march meet
March Meeting 2023
It’s that time of year again. The time when we look to our calendar, book our flights and hotels for APS March Meeting (MM), and navigate a byzantine reimbursement process. For those of you who don’t run in these circles, MM is one of, if not, THE biggest1 physics conference of the year. It’s absolutely packed with back to back talks and you’re guaranteed to be forced to choose between multiple overlapping talks for any timeslot.
It is also probably the conference I hate the most. It’s just too busy and I find myself usually overwhelmed with choices. Additionally, most of the talks in the focus sessions are something like 10 minutes, with 7 minutes of actual speaking and then a few minutes for questions. This means that unless you are intimately familiar with the subject, there’s a good chance you will be totally lost. Often, even if you are an expert, the huge variance in speaker presentation skills will limit your ability to understand what is going on. In terms of gaining substantial new knowledge, smaller conferences, single- or dual-stream, are much superior to MM.
It’s About The People
After meditating deeply on my dislike for MM, I have decided that I was not approaching it correctly. And, indeed, a successful March Meeting strategy differs depending on who you are and what you want. The least impactful use of MM is to purely gain new scientific knowledge from the talks. March Meeting is actually about the people attending, and you should act accordingly. That means that, depending on your level of knowledge/seniority you need to take different approaches. I suspect the following will be most useful for undergraduates, new graduate students, and recently graduated BS holders going to some sort of relevant industry position.
Strategies
Here’s my breakdown of conference for the difference classes of people attending.
Undergrads
The problem with being an undergraduate is that, even if you have research experience, you basically don’t know shit. Sorry, that’s just the way it is. Very few undergraduates have had the time and opportunity have even chosen a field, much less started deeply reading the literature.
With that said, I think the optimal undergraduate strategy is to exclusively attend Invited talks2 and mostly ignore the Focus sessions. Don't limit yourself to one field, try to go to as many as sound even kind of interesting. The strategy here is to find the longest interesting-sounding talks you can and go to those. Why the longest? You want the speaker to have plenty of time to establish context and motivation, and not to feel rushed to get through all of the slides3. Take notes! When you hear something interesting/unclear, write down the phrase. Take note of every reference on the slides, if you can. You might not ever look at them, but it is better to have and not need than to need and not have.
You should also be trying to meet people. If you’re planning on going to grad school and have a rough idea of your interests, you should ask your faculty advisor if they know anyone at the schools you’re interested in and whether they can put you in touch. Not everyone goes to MM every year, but there’s a good chance the PIs of productive groups will be attending, and you might be able to grab 5-10 minutes of their time. If you manage to set up a few of these meetings, also try to get intros to the prof’s grad students. Don’t forget to follow up with an email, a few days later.
Junior Graduate Students (Y1, Y2)
The first thing you should do is ask your PI and senior grad students/post-docs how you should approach MM. If they are unhelpful4, then you can turn to some internet rando5 for advice.
As a new grad student, you’ve probably only just joined a lab and only just started to dive into the literature. You are likely still confused about, well, everything. The strategy for you is similar to the undergrad, in that you schedule should mostly comprise invited talks, but they should be in your field or closely related. You should also go to some focus sessions that are specifically relevant to the project you’re working on. You can try taking detailed notes, but I don’t know how useful that would be. Just practice writing down citations or arXiv numbers quickly. Most of the talks you see should have an associated arXiv posting. Like the more senior grad students, you should be planning out which talks you attend ahead of time, familiarizing yourself with the abstracts, and maybe skimming the relevant papers.
The cool thing about being a graduate student is that, unless you’re in a totally dysfunctional group6, your PI and senior lab members have a vested interest in your professional success. They should probably be introducing you to people unprompted, but you can always ask explicitly!
Don’t forget, you can just walk up to people and start talking to them7.
Senior Graduate Students (Y3+)
At this point, you probably don’t need advice, but I’ll put a few lines here just in case it helps motivate someone out there.
Sometime during Year 3 of grad school I had a transformative experience. It was like a light switch flipped in my brain. I suddenly kind of knew what I was doing. I guess enough synapses connected and associations were made where I finally felt like I kind of understood what was happening around me and could synthesize some of the things I learned to make new insights8.
As a senior graduate student at March Meeting, you will probably benefit from going to some Focus sessions and invited talks, partially because you will need to explain things to your more junior colleagues. At this point, part of going to March Meeting is also preparing for March Meeting. You’ll probably want to read through the list of (relevant sessions) and click through to each one that looks interesting or relevant. At minimum, you should read and make note of the abstracts, and a rough plan of which talks you will be going to.
A thorough prep will involve making sure to (re)read the arXiv papers the abstracts are based of off. You don’t have to go line by line, but if you’ve got a decent idea of the main results and the figures, the talk can fill in details for you. Naturally, this kind of prep work can’t be done in cram-session. This will take weeks, so you'll need to start early9 to make the task manageable. I can't decide which approach is right for you, but in the worst case scenario10, you will fall to your highest level of preparation.
You should also start thinking about what you want to do after you graduate. You might think that day is years away, but as the great bard Steve Miller once said:
Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’
Into the future
Do you want to do a post-doc? Go into industry? National Lab? Finance? Which lab? Which company? Does your PI know anyone there? Do you know anyone there?
You don’t have to figure all of this out immediately, but you don’t want to be like me11.
Since MM is a huge convergence of physicists from all over academia, national labs, and industry, it’s a great place to start laying the foundation for your future by chatting with people about their very interesting work and about how (or whether) it matches your skillset. Who knows, maybe you’ll make a friend! Maybe you’ll find a unlikely collaborator!
Post-Docs/Profs/etc
You should know what you’re doing, so there’s not really much to say here. From the industry side, I like to use MM to scope out promising students who might want to abandon the academy in favor of a life of incredible luxury and excess12.
Minimum Viable Outfit
I will die on this hill. March Meeting is a meeting of professional physicists for professional physicists. It is an Occasion. You should dress the part. Taking some minimal care and pride in your appearance in public should not be too much to ask. I get that graduate students are famously informal in their attire13, but those of you who work in industry should be dressed better. You have a real career and a real paycheck, buy yourself some decent shoes, pants, and a button down shirt. You are a representative of your organization!
Conclusion
I recognize that, despite my distaste, it should be possible to squeeze value out of the APS March Meeting. Unfortunately, I have concluded that this inescapably requires us to actually talk to strangers, some of whom might be Very Famous. I sincerely apologize to my fellow introverts, but that’s kind of just how it is. Go start a conversation. Maybe it will inadvertently be with me!
See you there.
The APS April Meeting (for space stuff and HEP?) is probably similarly sized, but we don’t talk about them.
In the March Meeting Schedule, it is possible to filter by Invited talk, among other things.
Until they have 5 minutes left and realize they have 21 more slides to go through.
For example, if they say some shit like “idk go listen to some talks”
It me.
Find a new group.
This is easier if you watched their talk and found it genuinely interesting. It’s as easy as ‘Hi, I’m <HUMAN NAME>, I really liked your talk! Can I ask you about <SPECIFIC DETAIL>?’ and go from there.
It was an amazing feeling and, honestly, I’m still chasing that high.
You need to start now!
Your flight was delayed/cancelled, you barely got any sleep, your dog is sick, etc.
Realize you really don’t want to do a post-doc about 6 months before graduating and end up shooting out 70+ applications in the weeks after your defense, trying to break in to a new field.
Actual amount of luxury and excess not guaranteed.
I too wore the grad student uniform: graphic tee, shorts, and flip-flops (not in lab, usually).
Flops in lab are a no-go, but office-flops are in right now
When I first saw this, I though that MM means "March Madness".
Apparently, this is correct. . .