It’s the first time Stella is organizing a session at the upcoming, 2022 EGU general assembly. Tantalized yet nervous due to the possibility of a forced merger with another, uninspiring session, she exclaims:
How do I get people to submit abstracts to my session?
Dear Stella,
Why don’t you write a post on this very blog? Oh wait, you’re not the first one to do that. Ugh. How uncreative of me! Not as uncreative as others with the same idea though; what a good idea it is to pander to the geodynamics community on a topic that is obviously of interest to them! On a topic that your fellow researchers can and will find themselves on the EGU programme page. On a topic that is quite boring, to be frank. Rather uninspiring I say. No …. forget what I said. Not a new blog post. In fairness, tweeting your five followers also does not stand much of a chance to attract a bulky audience to your session.
So, what’s left? Not much, really. As a first-timer you don’t have much of a network yourself, do you? So emailing people will be over quite soon I imagine. Wait! What’s that?! Is that a distressing email to the GD committee to poach the entire contact list I spy with my little eye? Ooh, you rascal. You, rapscallion, you! How conniving, yet harmless. A brilliant idea in my honest opinion. It’s not like people just trash every email they get from the EGU… In this pandemic and with an absence of pure face2face contact, the real exponential growth is found in those infectious throw-around emails (way more than before) that pander to our inner geodynamicist instincts. That is, tease us with supposed scientific breakthroughs and opportunities to network, which unceasingly ends with you sitting sadly behind your screen due to poor quality; of the science, the setup of the event, and of course the internet connection. So yes, COVID is indeed zoonotic, and we’ve ended up with both a pandemic and a pander-mic.
To be honest, I suppose it is the best way to contact people directly. Yes, maybe you need to dig around in the merciless swamp that is the geodynamics scientific literature. Maybe you need to do some soul searching after coming across the fourth T. Jones at Billabong University who co-authored that gem of a paper. Maybe you even need to go through previous EGU GAs just to see what people were working on a year ago (*wink there’s a good chance most of that work is still unpublished….*wink). That could work.
Or you ask your (ex-)supervisor if they have a couple of friends in need of a session. Always worked for me!
Yours truly,
The Sassy Scientist
PS: This piece of text was written rather lacklusterly, yet with an audience due to the magic of social media. Whoop Whoop!
