What is it about business trips?

Not mine, of course. 

 It's been quite a while since I had a business trip.  Considering my new career, I would even count "flying with one of my kids out to visit a friend and her family for the weekend" as a sort of business trip.  Making connections, after all, is what I do. 

 The last time I had a trip paid for by my employer was in the summer of 2001.   It was an academic conference in New Hampshire* that lasted several days.  I brought my nursing baby, and my husband came so he could take care of said baby while I was in the seminars and the poster sessions.   This was one of the famous Gordon Conferences, informal, with dormitory-like housing and common meals.  "Summer camp for scientists," one of my friends described it to me before we went.  

The conversations and arguments and presentations spilled out of the conference room and into the dining room.  People sketched diagrams on napkins in between bites of lunch.  Late one evening I went downstairs to check the bulletin board and found several fairly eminent researchers in my field clustered around a bottle of Irish Mist and laughing uproariously. 

Does that sound fun to you?  I hope it does.  Me, I spent the whole week with a sick black hole in the pit of my stomach.  My research wasn't good enough, I was in the wrong place, I just wanted to sink back into the wall and disappear, and the baby made me really, really conspicuous.  Summer camp for scientists -- maybe.  For me it felt more like gym class.  Boarding and dining with your fellow conference goers?   The "collegial atmosphere" meant that I couldn't escape, even for the length of a cup of coffee.  Did I mention that I have a deep-seated fear of small talk?  Let alone small talk that might morph into "Oh, your advisor is Dr. S___?  I've known him for thirty-five years!  What's he up to?"

In one especially horrifying incident conversation among about a dozen researchers at after-dinner coffee, an eminent Japanese researcher -- who had studied under my adviser years before --  asked me to describe my research.  I gave my carefully prepared brief summary.  The Japanese scientist, along with the other men and women from industry, academia, and government labs, standing in a tight little circle with their coffee cups, listened to me quietly; and then ended the conversation by saying, "I think Dr. S____'s students are not quite as brilliant as they used to be."

Pause for a moment and tell me how you might reply to that, friend. 

I don't think my advisor got his money's worth out of sending me to that conference.  But I sure learned something.

Hm, I notice that this post has gone a bit off tracks.  I was going to write about Mark's business trip, the one that ends today when he gets home from three days in Missouri, in midafternoon.  I guess I'll write that post some other time.  When I woke up this morning I was feeling sort of grumpy and tense for a variety of reasons having to do with homeschool planning mostly, and now that I have spent a few moments reminiscing about my graduate school days, I feel a lot better about my vocation.  Whew.

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*The conference depicted in this post is a composite.  Inexplicably, my advisor paid good money to send me to the Gordon Research Conference twice.  The first time I went alone, the second time with my husband and baby.  I have horrifying memories of both. 

Comments

[Sara]

Thank you for this well-timed post. I am supposed to make arrangements to withdraw from grad school today, and my resolve had been weakening.

[mrsdarwin]

Geez, what a jerk. I hope Mr. Eminent Put-down Scientist is happy with his lot in life, which probably does not include a supportive spouse and three lovely children.

[Christy P]

Having just returned from my first business trip away from my nursling - this post hit home. It felt weird to sleep alone for the first time in over 2.5 years. I kept looking around my feet and reflexively sticking out my hand when descending staircases or escalators. I thought that my LL Bean schoolbag that served as my luggage for the short trip was less comfortable than a toddler in the Ergo. My breasts hurt, and I woke up in the night worried that she wouldn't want any mommymilk when I got back. The irony? It was a meeting for researchers who work on Natural Family Planning.

Such that this is not a total downer -- there were at least two bright spots, dinner with a friend who lives in DC and getting to watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. We don't get Comedy Central.

[bearing]

Mrsdarwin, you cannot imagine how many times I have replayed that moment in my mind and wondered what the hell was going on there. At the time, well, I was so certain that my work was substandard that I couldn't even see "wow, that was a really inappropriate comment --" you see, I rather agreed with him, and it seemed to me that he was merely giving voice to a truth that was obvious to everyone around.

So... I just slunk away as quickly as I could. Perhaps if I had been able to look about at the other scientists who were part of the conversation, my stunned expression might have elicited a supportive comment from one of the others, something that would have defused that awful silence.

As time has passed I have come to believe that one thing in play here was the Japanese scientist's failure to grasp, or possibly to give a $#!& about, certain cultural and linguistic nuances proper to a combined social/professional gathering in America among people ranging from lowly graduate students and unpublished researchers in industry to internationally known, top researchers in the field. He had a reputation in my research group of being a sort of loose cannon.

This has made me a bit more sympathetic to him, because, of course, the whole reason I was so uncomfortable there is that I had such a hard time navigating a combined social/professional gathering among people from across the eminence spectrum. I have enough trouble at after-church coffee 'n' donuts.