My first in-person conference experience! CVPR 2022

Hi there,

Sorry, this post is a bit of an anomaly compared to my other recent blogs. I am going to share my first in-person conference experience. I attended CVPR in New Orleans last week, and it was fun!

Instead of writing long-ass paragraphs about my experience, I will just split my experience into 4 segments with bullet points.

What I liked:

1. Man, there was a lot of energy and excitement all around. Seeing other people excited makes me more excited.
2. There is a little bit of something for everyone. If you work in a niche field, bam, there’s a workshop, if you are interested in learning some new techniques, bam! there’s a tutorial. You will not get bored, and you can spend 8–5 at the convention center.
3. People are nice in general and they are open to talking. Unless you want to meet some super busy hot-shot prof, you can reach out to a researcher and they are generally down to meet you.
4. You will get a quick overview of what’s happening in the field. I absorbed more information in this conference than I ever did in virtual conferences in the last 2 years.
5. You can make friends in other universities. I was contacted on Twitter (Thanks Vikram if you are reading this) to have lunch together, and I ended up meeting the whole gang and I met folks from CMU, MILA, MIT, and so on. All of them work in diverse fields and it was a lot of fun talking to them.

What I did not like so much:

1. Food. :| I wish the conference food was a bit better. As a vegetarian who does not eat mushrooms, it was a bit hard for me.
2. Coffee. There are only fixed times where we can get coffee, and it sucked. I wish conference organizers made sure there is coffee all the time.
3. A lot of interesting workshops/oral sessions were happening at the same time. So it was a bit hard to decide on which one to go to.
4. Meeting people and also attending talks is a bit exhausting. I tried to do both this time, but next time I’ll plan better.
5. Special 2022 entry — Covid & Masks

Things I wish there were more of:

1. There was a student mentorship session that happened and it had very few spots, I wish there are more interactive sessions like that.
2. At the end of Day 2, after NeRF workshop, a bunch of people spontaneously walked to the Marriot bar next door and did an informal gathering of sorts. I met a lot of interesting people there. I just happened to be at the right place. I wish conferences organize such after-hour informal meetings where we can just chat and meet people.
3. Have all workshops, and tutorials recorded and share them later.

Takeaways for the next conference:

1. Do not carry your laptop/other electronics if you are not going to use them. I carried them every day thinking I will need them, but I did not, and it unnecessarily exhausted me.
2. Make a list of sessions you want to attend before the conference or at least make a rough plan.
3. Do not be too aggressive with the plan, don’t fill up all 8–5 slots with something. Talking to people/Learning new things is exhausting.
4. Make a list of people you want to meet and message them before the conference and schedule the meetings.
5. The strategy of twos: This is a good one. I realized I am best at socializing if I have a friend around. So if you are on a mission to socialize, going with one friend might work out better than going alone.
6. Don’t have lunch with friends. Instead, sit at a random table. I met some awesome folks that way.
7. Have some fruit/energy bar on you at all times.

Overall, I had a lot of fun. And I am looking forward to going to more in-person conferences in the future. :)

I hope you found this blog post helpful. If you have any tricks to optimize attending a conference, please drop them in the comments. I will add them to the post and attribute them to you. :)

Thank you Kamal Gupta for contributing some of the points, and proofreading the post.

Cheers, G 💯.