The IOP conference

This years IOP conference took place from the 3-5 April at the University of Surrey . For anyone who's not familiar with the conference it's aimed at getting all the final year students to give a conference talk before the end of their PhDs. It's also a very good excuse to get the students and lots of the staff from all the groups over the country together for a few (!) drinks.

Somehow, and I'm still not sure how, I managed to end up responsible for everyones paperwork. For any current second year students out there I'd avoid this at all costs! It took 24 forms, one lost cheque and a lot of chasing but finally we were registered.

The week before the IOP conference we're expected to give a practice run in front of the group at Imperial. I think it's fair to say that whilst this was incredibly useful it was also totally disheartening, probably for the staff as well after 7 hours! The most important lesson for me seemed to be that as I'd gotten used to giving collaboration talks I'd also picked up some really bad habits. The biggest criticsims, providing far too much information on the slides and my use of complete scentences.

The real thing, strangely, was a lot less scary (even in the main lecture theatre) and despite all my complaints beforehand about ending up in a session with mainly ZEUS students, I actually really enjoyed it. In fact the talks I enjoyed most were nearly always from the running experiments. I guess it's good to see something other than MC studies for once. The downside was that everyone was there for these talks and few people showed interest in the two LHCb talks tagged on at the end.

It was really good to catch up with everyone else in my year and I've probably learnt a fair bit from all the talks but I'm glad it all only happens once!