I was given the opportunity to attend a Biological Methylation Meeting in Lisbon, Portugal, where I was able to meet the experts in the field, whose papers and publications I have been reading since I started graduate school! It was such a great experience, and it was 5 days full of science, all directly related to my field of work! I've been to other conferences, that were more broad and general, and I didn't enjoy them as much as I enjoyed this conference! I was just putting up my poster during the first session (my session was the second one) and I got stopped immediately and was talking about my research the whole two hours, and then the whole two hours at my actual session! It was such a great feeling to have people who knew about my research and were genuinely interested - talking science for 4 hours and getting so many good ideas of things to try! I even won the poster award, along with a travel award, which gave me some funding to help with my travel expenses!
Traveling to conferences is a BIG thing I would suggest to anyone who is in grad school. I have taken advantage of conferences to feed my travel bug, and it has opened up so many doors and networking opportunities! And if your boss/advisor can pay for you, it is a free ticket to travel (most of the time!). I have always taken advantage of vacation time after the conferences I've been to - Like last year I was in Barcelona for a conference and I traveled to visit my family in Cyprus afterwards, and this year I traveled to France after! So definitely a way to enjoy your time by having an international conference and using it as an excuse to travel around! Of course, any travel after a conference is on your dime, but compared to the full price of a plane ticket TO europe, its not too bad :) and I had some savings that I put aside especially for a european trip that I utilized to pay for this trip! It was amazing, because after I passed my candidacy exam, I told myself, when I graduate, I'm going to travel around europe, and I made a list of all of these cities I wanted to visit, and I made part of it happen! Graduation happened and I got to check off a few cities (not all of them, but a few is better than none!).
Scroll down to read more about the various photos I took (all with my iPhone 6!! Amazing camera for a phone!).
The conference even organized a wine tasting tour in the Marfa province, which was about a 45 min drive from where the conference was being held, and it was really great drinking wine in the countryside with professors and experts in my field! It was unreal and like a dream!
