When the COVID-19 pandemic put Canada into a full nation lockdown on March 13th, many meetings and events were cancelled, postponed, or shifted to an online virtual platform. This put a lot of people on edge since we lost the social aspect of networking and presenting our work. For people in research, these meetings were conferences. Right before Canada, and essentially the rest of the world, went into a full lockdown I was supposed to travel to the Woodlands Texas for the 51st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) to present my PhD research on constraining the temperature of impact melt deposits. I was excited because that year I was awarded one of the Early Career Development Awards and I was granted my first oral presentation at a scientific conference! You could imagine as soon as I heard the news that LPSC was cancelled I immediately felt sad and unmotivated. Fast forward one year later, we arrive at the first ever virtual LPSC, the 52nd LPSC (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Banner for the 52nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Credit: LPI
Now, there were some concerns when the Lunar and Planetary Institute announced the conference would be fully virtual. The main concern is how will students and young early career scientists gain the same level of networking as if at LPSC in person? This was a concern of mine, especially since I am aiming to defend my PhD in August this year. I wanted to know how I, and other students and early careers, would be able to meet senior scientists at virtual LPSC this year and promote our skill sets and research. Even though this year I could not submit an abstract, I asked my supervisors if I could register for the conference anyway. It was only $65 USD compared to previous years where I would normally have to pay closer to $280 USD. Both of my supervisors said yes, so I jumped onto the LPSC website and registered! In addition to registering, I also applied to be a microblogger where my role would be to promote lightning talk sessions, iposters, peripheral events, and live presentations. In early March, I was given the good news of being selected to be one of the microbloggers (Figure 2). In this post, I want to share with you all my experience and thoughts on LPSC this year and what this could mean for conferences moving forward.
Figure 2. Twitter template I made as my introduction to being a #LPSC2021 microblogger! Thank you again LPI :)
The Conference As A Microblogger
Attending LPSC as a student vs a microblogger is a completely different experience. As a student, I have the freedom to attend as many or as little oral and poster sessions as possible and chat with other students, early career, and senior scientists about planetary science, topics related to my research, and opportunities such as internships and future jobs. As a microblogger, I realized that I took a lot of that freedom for granted. Not that being in the microblogger role hindered me from networking by any means, I was just limited to how many talks I could attend each day. One of my roles as a microblogger is to use my social media platforms to share cool or interesting results from people's presentations (unless they give a disclaimer and say they don't want their results shared) and help advertise posters, lightning talks, and special events (e.g., Live from LPSC public nights, NASA HQ Briefing, Astrobiology Decadal Survey, and the LPSC Dance Party) (Figure 3). I really enjoyed this part because I was able to engage with a lot more people at the conference. I got into posting about peoples research during the conference so much that I was announced as the microblogger of the day on Monday, March 15th! I was very shocked to hear this news, as well as thankful. Not that I didn't engage with people at previous LPSC, but as a microblogger I felt more inclined to overcome my socially awkward personality and interact with new people. Although when I say engage with people, what I mean is I would log onto Gather.Town and run around and find people I knew or names I recognized from papers or university profiles I have read.
Figure 3. A collection of the other microblogging templates and banners I made for Twitter
I will say that Gather.Town definitely made the virtual experience a lot better than it would have been if it was not used. For those who are not familiar with Gather.Town, it is an online platform where you create a custom 2-D world and control an avatar to interact and connect with people (Figure 4). If I was to describe it, it has a 70-80s arcade feel mixed with a little bit of Pokémon Gold and Silver! I honestly was expecting a Pokémon to jump out of the swimming pools and bushes that were put into the LPSC Gather.Town world.
Figure 4. Image I took of my avatar on the Moon Walk room created in the LPSC Gather.Town world.
I used my role as a microblogger to test out Instagram live as I have been curious on whether or not I should use it to chat about my research and science communication. I had never hosted a live Instagram session before so I was a bit nervous. I decided to host three live sessions at 11 am EST on March 16th-18th (Figure 5). The topic of the live sessions was a casual chat about LPSC where I would talk about the sessions and events I attended at LPSC the previous day. In the end, I really enjoyed hosting the live sessions. I didn't get great engagement (had at most 8 people viewing at once), but that is mainly because I don't have a huge following on Instagram. However, I felt comfortable while talking and felt like I could continue hosting these in the future. Now I wouldn't do this every week, because (1) you feel a bit drained afterwards from talking non-stop, (2) it is a lot better with a guest so I would want to reach out to people to invite before organizing one, and (3) people would get fed up of me talking all the time :P I do think this is something I could do after another conference, update on a planetary mission, or perhaps a general chat about my research and why I am working towards being a member of the planetary science community.
Figure 5. Illustration I used to advertise my Instagram live sessions chatting about the LPSC conference.
A few people said I was doing a great job as a host. If you are interested in listening to the chats I saved the live streams as videos on my Instagram account @GavinOnTheMoon.
The hardest part about being a microblogger was definitely multitasking. I will admit that this difficulty would be a lot less intense if the conference was in person, but I think the scenario of being stuck at home attending the conference online makes this harder. Since LPSC was virtual this year, I was not taken away from my constant checking emails during work, marking assignments, and keeping up to date with certain deadlines (although if I had deadlines during or right after the conference I would grudgingly be working on them a the conference center...). Having to microblog sessions, listen to speakers who's research I have interest in, and keep track of my day to day tasks is tiring. More mental than physical. It is quite hard to listen intently to a talk while at the same time you have several students asking questions about the lab assignment that is due at the end of the week (annoyingly, most of the questions they asked could have been resolved using Google...I just didn't have the heart to ignore the emails...). Also, the loss of walking from session to session in the conference center is taken away so you have the added problem of feeling slouched after sitting in the same position for hours in one day. I tried to counteract this by unplugging my headphones and running on the spot in my room while listening to sessions. It worked for most of the time but eventually I came to problem of having sore feet haha. This is not a fault of the conference, it is more that we need to find ways to balance attending conferences virtually in the comfort of our own home and making sure our physical and mental health is not damaged in the process.
The Likes and Dislikes
Let us talk about the pros and cons I have on LPSC this year!
Pros of Virtual LPSC
The biggest pro personally is the diverse array of talks that were organized for this year. The advantage of virtual conferences is anyone with internet access and enough funds to submit an abstract and register can present their work. I don't have the stats on me, but I feel this year a greater number of international participants took part in LPSC. I felt like most days were not dominated by the two largest planetary science communities: Mars and the Moon. Ironic for me to say this being a lunar PhD student, but I feel when I see days that are primarily about one planetary body I get put off. Not because I won't find the talks interesting, but because I would become oversaturated with information and end up losing focus during talks a lot more and end up skipping sessions. The 2nd day of LPSC this year was a Mars day and the 3rd day was a Moon day, but that was it! I never got the feeling that each day the Moon or Mars community were trying to be the center of attention. I know for the next few years, Mars 2020 will be granted a lot more oral sessions because they will be gathering data and the science team will be presenting new hypotheses about whether microbial life ever existed on Mars. I will end up loving and hating these moments because I get to listen to incredible science, but I also have to see the other planetary science communities become tuned out as a result...
I already mentioned this before, but Gather.Town was definitely a big pro for the conference. Without it, I think it would have been harder for students to meet new people and for friends and colleagues who haven't seen each other since LPSC in 2019 to catch up! A Slack channel was also set up for LPSC attendees, which made it easier to contact people not on Gather.Town and to advertise sessions throughout the week. This was a great addition to the conference, and it shows how useful Slack for these types of meetings. In addition, people were able to connect with each other around the world, something that might not have happened if the conference was held in person.
Cons of Virtual LPSC
The con I am going to mention here is going to sound a little bit controversial, but I felt like the networking events (mainly the LPSC Networking Event), were not as beneficial as the networking events normally held at LPSC in person. The main reason was since senior scientists and NASA staff had to stay at home while attending the conference, they had to juggle their home responsibilities as well as work responsibilities. No one was able to leave these responsibilities behind like you would be able to when you attend a conference in person. Because of this, I felt like the Networking Events were easier to attend for people who probably have little or no home responsibilities (e.g., children, pets, family members, etc). When I attended the LPSC Networking Event, I realized that almost all of the people logged onto Gather.Town were students and post-docs. Compared to in-person, there were not a lot of senior scientists, which limited the amount networking opportunities for students, postdocs and other early-career scientists attending. Again, this is why I mentioned that this con was controversial, because it is not the conference organizers or the conference attendees fault. It is more of a situational issue, being on an online platform and not being able to travel to the conference and focus solely on the conference.
My Favourite Session
Now a favourite session was hard for me to pick because there were a lot of good sessions this year. We had live presentations on the initial results from the Mars Perseverance rover team, several talks on the interior, surface and atmospheric processes of ocean worlds and outer solar system moons, and new updates on the NASA Artemis initiative. The reasons for why I chose my favourite session include (1) my general interest in the research topic itself, and (2) the inclusion of multiple planetary bodies. My favourite session was titled "Great Balls of Fire: Explosive Volcanism Across the Solar System" (Figure 6), held on March 16th at 2:30 pm Central Time. This session discussed research on explosive volcanism on Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the Moon and how their chemical and physical properties can provide us with insights into the interior volatile content and their thermophysical structures. It is a session I thoroughly enjoyed as I did not take my eyes away from my screen for one second.
Figure 6. Illustration I made to advertise the Great Balls of Fire session on Twitter.
If you attended LPSC and have some experiences you want to share, please comment on this post! If you want to check out some of my LPSC microblogger posts follow me on Twitter and Instagram at @GavinOnTheMoon.
See you all next time!
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