Cryptic Meg

Last week it was the annual meeting of the Association of British Neurologists in Harrogate, and my first in-person conference! I had submitted an abstract on my PhD work so far, which had been accepted for poster presentation. If you’re interested, you can see it here:

So last Tuesday I rather nervously packed up my bags and made the long train journey to Harrogate, poster in tow. It was an immensely hot and packed train, which then got delayed in Derby for an hour due to a signalling failure. But I did manage to make my scheduled dinner with some old university friends in Leeds, so all was not lost!

The next day I went to the conference. I was scheduled to be part of a poster tour in the evening: posters from Early Career Researchers had been grouped into subjects – mine was part of the Movement Disorders tour. We put up the poster nice and early, and then I spent most of the day wandering around the other posters and practising my little presentation.

I was really pleased with how the tour went. I delivered the talk that I had prepared and then fielded some insightful questions afterwards. After the tour was finished, I stayed with my poster and had some further interesting conversations. I’m a computer scientist and am approaching the project from that technical perspective – it’s really valuable to be able to talk to neurologists about the applications of AI research from their clinical perspective.

I stayed in Harrogate for a couple more days, until the end of the conference. I had a very lovely time exploring, which I will write about separately. But to continue the story of the conference…

On Friday morning, I received a call from my supervisor.

“Are you still in Harrogate?” he asked.

“Yes, but I’m leaving after lunch,” I replied.

“Ah, that’s a shame. I’ve just heard that the poster has been shortlisted for the poster competition – it’s in the top five, and they’ll be announcing the winner this afternoon.”

I had to get him to repeat this information – not just because it was a bad line, but also because I was so shocked! I had been aware that there was a poster competition, but had thought no more of it.

Later in the day I was standing at Leeds station, awaiting my train back to Devon. As the train arrived at the platform, I was approached by someone from our department – coincidentally she was getting the same train.

“Did you stay?” she asked. “Have you heard the news?”

“No…?”

“You won!”

Well gosh. What an affirming first conference experience! This just might help beat back that pesky imposter syndrome! I’m thrilled that people were so interested in our research. I’m presenting another poster later in the year in Madrid – hopefully I’ll be able to go into that with some confidence!