On Sunday I took a city bus from our campsite to the Denver Conference Center.
This is very convenient (1 bus, running hourly) but slow. However, I got there safely and with minimal hassle. I felt a bit guilty leaving Chuck behind at the rapidly warming campsite.
I have been a professor since 1987, but I still never learn. When a colleague asked me if I would be a mentor in a workshop on technical writing for “new” statistical researchers, I said yes without asking what would be involved. It turned out that the workshop ran all day on Sunday and on Tuesday morning, and that I needed to give a one hour presentation at 8 a.m. on Tuesday. As well, I needed to read and comment on a technical paper written by my mentee. Needless to say, creating the presentation and reading the paper took up several evenings on the trip.
Since the workshop was organized by people I know, it was perhaps not surprising that I knew most of the mentors. I was a bit surprised that I also knew many of the junior researchers, as several were recent PSU grads. I enjoyed meeting my mentee and giving her feedback on her paper, which had already been submitted for peer reveiw (and returned for revisions). One of the enjoyable parts of this type of workshop is hearing others give the same advice that you would give. On the other hand, as the last speaker, I had to listen to the other talks to be sure I was adding something to the discussion.
Sunday evening we had dinner with Maddie, daughter of our good friends Susie and Phil. She is doing a post doc in biochemistry in Denver and seems to be doing extremely well, having recently received a fellowship for her work. This is a tough field to break into, with many researchers having to take several postdoctoral positions in different labs before embarking on their own careers as principal investigators, so it was great to hear about her successes.
On Monday at 8:30 I gave a talk on how to write a tutorial for non-statisticians, in a session on teaching statistics via articles. It was quite fascinating to hear the experiences of the other speakers, especially Prof. Hayat, who was one of the first statisticians to work in a nursing school and who has been very instrumental in introducing statistical methodology in nursing studies.
Most of the remaining time was spent “networking” a convenient term for meeting old friends in the statistical community. This included my former graduate student, Isaac, my just graduated student, Frank, and many friends I met at school or during my career. Chuck has met most of these people at one time or another, and came downtown for dinners and the occasional lunch. I did not really do any sightseeing, except for walking many times through the restaurant district and 16th St. Mall.
Chuck has his own blog entry.