How to spice up a conference

A group of us exercise physiology students and faculty recently returned from the Southeast regional chapter meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine. The conference was held in Birmingham, AL, at a very nice hotel that is connected onto a fairly good-sized mall. Three of us presented research (I presented a condensed version of my master's thesis research from last year), and everyone did well and a good time was had by all. Towards the end of the weekend though, we were getting kind of silly, and we thought up ways that we could really spice up next year's regional meeting, or any conference for that matter. Here are some of our ideas.

1. When presenting research, you should try speaking in several different foreign accents. The trick is to smoothly transition from one to another. That way, the moderators and people in the audience will be too busy trying to figure out if 1) you are in fact speaking with an accent and 2) what kind of accent you're using, and therefore they won't bother asking you any actual questions on the content of your presentation.

2. You should try creating a fake poster and pin it up at an empty space during one of the actual poster sessions. When people come by to ask you questions, you should either tell them that you can't answer them because your research is classified, or act incredibly disgusted that they would even dream of wasting your time with such an elementary question. Here are some possible poster topics that we came up with:

a. The effect of a long car ride on asymmetric lower extremity swelling in a pregnant female: a case study. This one was inspired by me, as I had rather swollen feet and ankles from sitting and standing for much of the weekend.

b. Exercise responses on Mars. This one would be great for telling people that you can't answer questions because your research is classified by NASA.

c. The effect of significant doughnut consumption on running performance during the Krispy Kreme Challenge. This would be a great one because you'd have a sample size of 5000, and the Krsipy Kreme Challenge actually exists.

3. As a corollary to item 2, and assuming that you could get the conference directors to agree, you could set up a poster session consisting of entirely fake posters. Or you could add in some mystery by having a poster session where only 1 of the posters is actually fake, and people have to see if they can guess which one it is.