conference – Coastally Curious

It’s that time again – the deadline for the next big conference in your field is fast approaching, and you are staring down a blank page. Where to start? How to make your abstract stand out and get noticed?

I recently had the opportunity to review conference abstracts for a major conference in our field. After reading over 50 abstracts for our session, the differences between outstanding abstracts and forgettable or insignificant ones became pretty clear. As I tried to articulate these thoughts for myself to evaluate the abstracts more consistently, I thought I should write it down for the benefit of the students that I supervise. I haven’t posted anything on here in a long time (sorry!), so then I also thought I would share it with the wider world in case it would be interesting for more of you.

Here are the most important things that I look for when evaluating conference abstracts:

Do you ever think about the swirling patterns in your cappuccino as you stir your spoon around, the brown coffee folding in past the white foam? And do you ever think about sediment transport as you do it? Just me? Ok, never mind…

I had the great privilege of hanging out in New Orleans this past week, being a sand nerd with four hundred of my fellow sand nerds at the Coastal Sediments conference. In between jazz sets at the Spotted Cat, we shared our latest ideas about coastal dynamics, built new collaborations, and rekindled old pre-pandemic friendships. My contribution this year was an attempt to bring the science behind cappuccino coffee swirls to coastal sediment transport.

Tag: conference

Writing a Killer Conference Abstract

The Cappuccino Effect