It was, indeed, a great experience for the McCullagh lab attending SfN 2022 at San Diego, CA this year. Jesse, Amita and Sabiha presented their research in SfN in person, while Andi chose the virtual platform. Their experience added a new spice, when on November 11, their flight from Stillwater to Dallas got canceled. All of them including Dr. Liz were trying their best to find out any possible solution but nothing worked out, since all flights from Tulsa and OKC to Dallas and suddenly no option was left except driving to Dallas from Stillwater and Yesss, finally they made it.

Jesse: “I had a great time at SfN, getting to meet so many new people and learn about so much ongoing research. At first, 24,000 people seems very overwhelming, but everything is pretty-well organized based on topic and field of interest, so it’s easy to find out where you want to be and who you’d like to meet. The vendors were fun, friendly, and sent me home with so many freebies I almost couldn’t zip my suitcase! San Diego is a beautiful city I was happy to enjoy with Liz, Sabiha, and Amita. Looking forward to next year in D.C.!”
Sabiha: For me, attending the conference in person and visiting San Diego both were my first time experience, so you can feel my excitement. I met a lot of scientists, students, scholars and got astonished to see how amazing and advanced neuroscience research can be and how differently people think and learn everything. There were a lot of options for mini symposiums, professional development workshops along with poster presentation sessions, which I found really helpful too to expand my knowledge that underlies my research interest. Also,the sparkling city light and bright sunshine is still on my mind. Such a beautiful and lively city is San Diego !
Andi: SfN virtual experience was good. There were so many videos from virtual submissions it was almost too much. It made it difficult to sort through and search for research that you were particularly interested in. There were live streams of minisymposium research that you could watch, about 20 minute presentations from the authors. There were also larger presentations that were about an hour you could watch, but my preference was the mini symposiums as the research was personally more intriguing. I had it on in the background while I worked, as each minisymposium was about 4 hours long. I feel like being virtual I did miss out on a lot of different research, as only a small portion of the total conference was part of the mini symposiums that were livestreamed.
Amita: Well, it is a big conference. It was my first in-person experience there with my advisor and lab members. We all had a great time there exploring knowledge through joining various poster sessions and lectures. We all presented posters there with a huge number of audience and suggestions from them. It was accomplished with dinner and a tour on the mission beach with my advisor and lab members having spent a great time with each other.
