How to Conference Better

I'm on my fourth (and thankfully last) day of my conference in Montreal, and I am way past ready to go home. The talks that excited me on day one are now barely interesting enough to keep me awake, and my stomach is unhappy from too many unhealthy meals out. I have 25 minutes until my next (and last) talk, so I thought I'd share a few of my thoughts on how to optimize a conference experience.  While they may not be interesting to anyone reading this, at the very least they might help me do better next time.

So...my advice:

1) Be selective:  Attention spans (especially mine) are limited.  Not even the calmest and least ADD person can be engaged for over 8 hours a day of lectures and poster sessions.  Pick only the sessions that are most interesting and useful, and use the remaining time to nap or exercise or explore a new city (if it isn't fricking cold, like it is here now).

2)  Consider going for only part of the conference:  As a lifelong keener, it's hard for me to not participate in something from the opening until the bitter end.  And as someone who is trying to live somewhat frugally, it feels like I'm only getting my money's worth if I stay for the entire conference.  But the reality is that the best talks are rarely on the first or last day.  In the end, I will have gone to only about two hours of talks on each of the first and last days, because there simply isn't that much of interest to me.  I could've saved two nights away from home (and two nights of hotel/food costs) if I'd come only for the most useful days. (Not to mention the fact that I could've avoided cancelling three half days of clinic.)

3)  Don't go to every conference:  Again, this is difficult for me, because I want to stay knowledgeable and current, and conferences are generally a good way of doing that. But, being in a small field, the research doesn't change all that much in the 3-4 months between conferences.  I think I'd actually be better off skipping some of the conferences and just dedicating a day to reading all the articles that are piling up in my "To Read" folder.

If you attend conferences, what other advice would you give?

Gender

Since I read Cheryl Sandberg's book Lean In last summer, I have been hyper-aware of the ways in which men and women in medicine behave differently.  I've noticed how men speak up more during lectures and stay at the microphone even after they've been told that the question period is over.  I've seen how male residents give orders to nurses while female residents make requests.  I've witnessed the self doubt of smart and talented female medical students contrasted with the cockiness of some not as smart and talented male medical students*.  It saddens and frustrates me to see, time and time again, women reflexively and unconsciously making themselves smaller because they've internalized the message that they are somehow lesser.  (And men making themselves bigger because they believe that they're greater.)

This morning I went to an educational session in which these gendered behaviour patterns were on full display.  The session was led by one male physician and one female physician, both of whom are well-respected in their fields and have similarly impressive CVs.  Although they were supposed to be equal co-chairs, the man completely dominated the session.  He read not only his introductory slides, but also hers.  He answered all of the questions without even acknowledging that his co-chair might have an opinion that she wanted to add.  The few times that she managed to start answering the question before him, he interrupted her to finish the answer.  And then, partway through the session, he deviated from the planned presentation and, without asking permission from his co-chair, started showing his own set of slides on his area of research.

I was livid!  I couldn't believe how blatantly disrespectful he was to his colleague.  And the worst thing for me was, I suspect I was the only person in the room who noticed.  We're so accustomed to this pattern of male dominance and female submission that we don't even bat an eye at it.  Even though the voice of another smart and talented woman was completely silenced in the process.

I'm still livid.

*In case it needs to be stated, I don't think that female medical students are inherently smarter and/or more talented than male students.  I've simply observed that women in medicine tend to underestimate their abilities, while many men do the opposite.

Montreal

I'm sitting in a hotel room in Montreal, awaiting dinner with a friend (in 1 hour) and the start of a conference (tomorrow morning), and I am struggling to write one of the blog posts that has been floating around in my brain for the past few weeks.  I want to write about how it feels to be six months into my work as an attending, about my struggles to start up a research program, or about my recent two-year anniversary, but all my brain and body want to do is rest.  In the past two weeks, I've taken on three extra clinics and an extra weekend of call, and while my net worth is very happy about the additional work, the rest of me is not.  I'm exhausted.

This past weekend, my girlfriend and I had a long discussion about careers and life goals and what is important to us.  Both of us want to do work that is meaningful and that hopefully makes the world a slightly less miserable place, but we also want to have full lives outside of our work.  We want to sleep in on weekends and cook good homemade food and read books and knit*.  And maybe even do productive things like exercise and clean our messy apartment.  If we run out of fun things to do, that is.

At the moment, it feels like what I want to do is always in conflict with what I need to do (work).  I wish at times (always) that I could go back a decade and live more frugally so that I would have actual money now, instead of debt, and would feel like I could take more time to myself.  I keep hoping that hitting the zero net worth mark will bring about a major change in how I feel and how I approach work.  I'm hoping that it will make me feel okay with saying no to the extra clinic time and the extra weekends of call.  Because while I like my job, I love my life outside of it more.

*Well, I want to knit.  Specifically this, in a gorgeous grey yarn that is ridiculously expensive but will be worth it because it will undoubtedly take me at least six months to knit the scarf, thus keeping the cost per hour of knitting very, very low.

November Lessons?

(This post might be a bit obnoxious, as I'm writing about finances from the perspective of a well-paid physician with no children living in a low cost-of-living area.  Feel free to skip it!  Please don't hate me.  I do recognize the incredible privilege and good fortune in being able to write a post like this.)

November started out as a really good month financially.  I was on call for nine days, which meant that I was earning an on-call stipend and consult fees on top of my usual clinic income.  I had recently increased the number of patients I was seeing per clinic, so even my relatively constant clinic income had taken a jump.  I felt flush.  Money was coming in more quickly than it ever had, and so it seemed silly for me to be sticking to a budget and limiting my spending.

Big mistake.

My change in spending habits started slowly, with a takeout meal on a night when the fridge was full of leftovers ("I work hard!  I deserve sushi instead of spaghetti!), but it quickly escalated.  Soon I was eating out in the fancy restaurants that had never seemed remotely worth the cost, and I was offering to pick up the tab for my friends. 

And then I went to San Francisco.

The trip was a combined conference and brief vacation with my girlfriend, so I convinced myself that I could completely ignore my budget and classify most of my spending as business expenses*.  $20 tequila sampler at the hotel restaurant?  Business expense.  $39 flight of port and $20 plate of cheese at a wine bar?  Business expense.  In just over a week, I spent more money on restaurants and new clothes and Trader Joe's chocolate than I had spent in months. 

And I'm not going to lie - it felt amazing.  It was fun to spend without thinking about money or entering expenses into my budget.  $20 plates of cheese are tasty.  And I felt strangely powerful sitting in Jardiniere, which was filled with the pre-opera crowd dressed in tuxedos and ball gowns**,  eating fancy french fries and ordering overpriced wine from a sommelier.  After 16 years of sacrifice, it felt like I had arrived.

Reality hit the day after our dinner at Jardiniere, when we had to pack to go home, and we didn't have room in our suitcases for all of our new things.  Then, when we were preparing our forms for customs, we realized that we had spent almost to the very generous customs limit, something neither of us has ever done.  The worst moment, however, was getting the credit card bill in December.  The only time I've ever had such a ridiculously high credit card bill was when I paid my fees for my licensing exam.  It was painful.

As a result of the overspending, I ended up in the red in December.  This was a huge (and painful) contrast to previous months as an attending, during which I'd been paying back some of my student debt and making healthy contributions to my retirement savings.  The whole month of December felt like a terrible hangover, as I watched all of my earnings go to MasterCard.

My initial take home lesson from November was "Stick to the budget!  Keep living like a student!", and for a while that's precisely what I did.  But as I look back at the month now, I wonder if that's the only lesson I should take from it.  Because although the month was way beyond sustainable spending for me, there were also a lot of good things about it.  While eating the flight of port and the cheese plate, my girlfriend and I had a wonderful conversation about our relationship and the future that makes me happy whenever I think about it.  While having dinner at Jardiniere, we realized that we never want to become people who own ball gowns and think we're special because we're eating in an expensive restaurant.  And we got to see Idina Menzel in a shitty musical, which was on my girlfriend's bucket list.  (Seeing Idina Menzel, that is.  Not the shitty musical.)

So...what to take from this experience?  First and foremost is the recognition that it is easy to spend a lot of money in a very short time.  And although I am earning more than I ever had, I can't afford to spend indiscriminately when I still have a six-figure debt.  (Or probably ever.)  Second is the reminder that people adapt to things very quickly.  While the unrestricted spending felt exciting in the beginning, after only a month it was starting to feel very ordinary.  And going back to my previously comfortable budget felt horrible.

Looking back at the month now, I think the overarching lesson I'm going to take is that splurging is fun, but it can't (and shouldn't) be an everyday thing.  I'm going to keep sticking with my budget and dutifully saving my money, but I'm also going to make sure that I leave some money for the really self-indulgent expenses that are worth it (like going to wine bars with my girlfriend). 

Balance.  Once again, the lesson is balance.

*Please note that this was only from a budget perspective and not a tax perspective.  Hi Revenue Canada!  I'm not evading taxes by claiming booze as a business expense!  Please don't audit me!

**I was in jeans, because I hadn't realized from the website just how fancy the restaurant was.  Awkward!

Paris

For days I have been wanting to write here, to share my thoughts about the conference I'm attending in San Francisco and to tell you about the places we've visited and the food we've eaten during the gaps between sessions.  To talk about things that are light and fun and pleasurable.  But I've felt like I can't talk about lightness and trivialities until I say something to acknowledge the recent attacks on Paris.

But what can I possibly say?

This is the third attempt that I've made at writing a post, and every attempt has seemed too....earnest? Cheesy?  Ignorant?  In my attempt to write something meaningful, I've given myself an incurable case of writer's block.  And now that it's late, and given that we have tickets to Alcatraz for early tomorrow morning, I'm going to say something quick to simply get it over with.

All that I'm going to say is the one thought that enters my head every time I hear about the attack on Paris and the resultant escalation of the war in Syria:  we have to find a better way.  As the (purportedly) most intelligent species on Earth, we need to acknowledge that our endless cycles of war are failing.  We aren't making the world safer by constantly responding to violence with more violence; we're simply creating more enemies.  And destroying the lives of more innocent people, both civilian and military.

We have to find a better way.

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Because this post isn't nearly as good as I would like it to be, here are the thoughts of some other people that I think are worth sharing:

An American college professor's eight ways to defend against terror nonviolently.

SLukettG's thoughts about the need to recognize the tragedies occurring throughout the world, regardless of the skin colour of the people affected.

Feel free to share any other links that you think are interesting/relevant (as long as they aren't racist or xenophobic) in the comments.  Or tell me your thoughts about all of the horrible things that are happening in our broken world.