My First Experience of the ASIS&T Conference
This post is by Miyoung Chong, a student at the University of North Texas and a volunteer at #ASIST2016.
I participated in the ASIS&T 2016 annual conference as a poster presenter. The funny thing is that the acceptance letter was originally sent to the spam mail box that I don’t pay attention to in general. However, when I found the notification email from the chairs of the poster session, prof. Colleen Cool and Theng Yin Leng, I was so glad. I got the notification around the midnight on August 1, 2016 when I was in Seoul, Korea. Korea had a record-breaking temperature this summer, and it was too hot to have a good sleep over the night in many days. I remember I couldn’t fall asleep that night because I was too excited about the news along with the tropical night.
The annual ASIS&T meeting was held in Copenhagen, Denmark this year, and the journey to conference started with the flight booking to Copenhagen. The conference was fun and meaningful in several ways. First of all, my heart was throbbing with the expectation because this is the first chance that I can actually meet prestigious scholars from the library and information science fields from other schools and institutions. Each conference day, my friend and I were searching for famous scholars and took pictures with them. From my professors, I have been told that networking is important in building an academic career, but I think I just really enjoyed meeting people who had similar research topics and interests at the conference venue.
I was also able to discover many interesting and recent research topics in the information science fields and further explore by asking questions and having conversations with the authors from various presentations. This made me feel that I am in the right place because when I was in the Global Marketing conference at Hong Kong in July this year, I could only meet mostly from marking and business study researchers.
The most fun part of the conference was participating in the conference as a volunteer. The volunteer job was basically preparing the assigned session and watching out the session to make sure everything was going smoothly. Stephen Addo, who works at the ASIS&T Membership Services, tremendously helped me to start and complete my volunteer work. Actually, I had imagined that he might be an old White man with many white hairs due to hard work or research, but he was totally the opposite!
The professional work done by the ASIS&T Membership Services staff at the conference inspired me, and I think their professional work strengthen the entire organization in diverse aspects. While working as a volunteer, I could have valuable conversations with the ASIS&T members from other schools, and I could simply enjoy the most prestigious conference in the information Science field with them. I value the opportunity and experience from working as a volunteer at the ASIS&T conference, and hope I can meet them again at the ASIS&T conference in 2017.