Your research is no more interesting than anyone else's

I've just got back from yet another conference, one more opportunity for the silverbacks to have a jolly at the taxpayer's expense, and I have to say it was most extraordinarily tedious. Scientific meetings are a bit like visiting the Nile valley. To outsiders it sounds very glamorous, travelling to far off places trying to decipher the hidden messages of ancient relics (be they pyramids or elder faculty). For a week or so it is all very exciting, especially the drinking and the attempts by female PhD students to secure funding horizontally, as it were. Sooner or later though, you realise that once you've seen one hieroglyph you've seen them all, just as one old relic's analysis of the Larsen B ice shelf is just the same as another's.

What makes these events particularly galling is the poor punctuality demonstrated by some of the more enthusiastic members of the scientific community. Typically, each speaker is allocated 12-20 minutes (plus five minutes for questions/physical assaults, depending on whose theory one has just disproved). Twenty minutes to me means just that - twenty minutes. It doesn't mean thirty minutes, and it most certainly does not mean forty six minutes and twenty two seconds. I don't care that you've spent the last thirty six months at a computer churning through your data and have become completely obsessed by it. I don't care if you do (mistakenly) believe that your findings are widely significant. If you can't summarise it to an expert audience in 20 minutes, then it's probably not worth explaining. The golden rule here is to remember, no matter how important your work is to you personally, it's no more interesting than anybody else's.

At the last meeting one enthusiastic post doc rambled on for so long that we had to miss one of the coffee breaks. There go his chances of ever making faculty. By lunchtime, some of the older members of the audience had fallen into a diabetic coma, whilst the research assistants were running amok through the building throwing delegate packs at each other due to caffeine withdrawal. Conference organisers have a habit of remembering these things. What's needed is the judicious use of a stopwatch and a gong by the chair. Anyone who hasn't reached their conclusions by the end of their allocated time gets brutally and unforgettably silenced. I don't pay registration fees of up to $100 to miss out on free coffee and biscuits.