Conferences

Five things I realised:

1. It seems that I can wake up and be motivated to attend things without much problems if I know that there will be morning tea, coffee, lunch, afternoon tea and ice cream breaks. Yum.

2. Not that I needed to do this but - the opportunities for networking with others in the field when people meet face to face. Sure you can contact people via whatever means, but the human touch of real life interactions is irreplacable.

3. Global health, vaccines, and WHO work is interesting.

4. Talks are more about sharing ideas, ways to explore an issue, discussions, debates, inspiring better approaches, rather than purely delivering a lecture on a topic people don't know about.

5. You can have great quality data, do a good research study, or have a great idea about solving a problem. But presenting it is just as important - it just doesn't look very professional if you have your "poster" presentation as a few loose black and white, A4 sheets in the regular size 12 font.