Experiencing the Annual Conference – Then and Now
As I was hunting for the Registration area today (4th floor for anyone who hasn’t checked in or registered yet), I couldn’t help comparing the experience with my first Annual conference as a PhD student (Houston, 2003). I had recently wrapped up my literature review and narrowed down my topic and my advisor encouraged me to present my work so far. Admittedly, this amounted to not very much, but I learned a valuable lesson about the importance of being precise in how I spoke about my problem after being grilled by a job shop scheduling expert when I vaguely mentioned batch scheduling during my talk. I was working in pure unrelated parallel machine scheduling so all these years later I’m not even sure why I mentioned batching at all. I may have forgotten the why but I haven’t forgotten the result!
Now, as a practitioner who mostly sticks to the INFORMS Analytics conference in the Spring and has been absent from the Annual conference for a few years, I am amazed at the growth from what it used to be. Just watching the sea of people crowding the escalators and hallways, scrambling to the next set of sessions, it’s obvious that today’s attendance dwarfs that of my early years. Is this due to the increased interest in Analytics and Data Science? Or has conference attendance become a more attainable or perhaps more vital experience for graduate students? Maybe students are savvier these days about the opportunities for networking and collaboration? Whatever the reasons, it’s great to see all the new faces and think about the innovations and new ideas they bring with them.