Conferences: 1 of 2

Haven't written in so long that I had to check my Google calender to see what happened since the last time I wrote. I've been really busy the last week. I had a normal-ish week Monday to Wednesday. Wednesday was especially long though because one of my classes got moved to the afternoon so I didn't have a nice block of classes. And then I flew off to Indiana on Wednesday night for the ESW National conference.

It took us 2 separate flights to get there and 2 separate flights to get back. I slept a lot on these series of flights. Circumstances just made it so that I was really tired when I got to the airport. I think I fell asleep on most of these flights before the plane took off and only woke up right before landing. I didn't even realized that my first flight was showing a movie. I also slept at the airport. On the way back, we walked to our gate and slept until it was time to board the plane. Didn't even bothered to go buy food or look for free wi-fi.

The conference itself was very interesting. I think we all got a lot of out meeting people from the different chapters. Honestly, I didn't know very much about the national organization at all before this. I had no idea what other chapters were doing so it was great to hear about other people's projects. I wish we had more sharing time though. What projects are other people doing, how are they progressing, next steps, the structure, how many people does it take to run something, etc. Totally seeing myself getting sucked into this organization at more than the project level.

At some of the member meetings, we introduced ourselves with name, university, major, and role in ESW. I was stumped by the "role" part for a while and decided on "project leader" after thinking it through. I honestly had never thought about my role in ESW. It's just something that I do. Never thought about it as a job description.

Most of the conference consisted of "breakout sessions" where there were 1-3 speakers from industry and academia. They talked about various topics, mostly about what their organization is doing in the context of sustainability. Again, I wish we had more time for discussion because people asked a lot of questions and they were generally very good questions. I will write more about this conference and the various adventures that we had soon. Right now I need to catch up on some sleep!