This is my first Annual Meeting in a number of years. My attendance at an earlier trip, back in 2015, was in partial service of event promotion. A few months' prior, I had been awarded the BPS Networking Event grant, and a small group of us in structural biology at Purdue was trying to revive our defunct graduate student symposium from scratch.

Although the symposium was primarily for Purdue students, in the spirit of the Networking Grant we opened up registration to everyone. Anticipating a moderate-sized event, our group spent months raising funds, both internally at Purdue and externally through corporate sponsors. We invited an outside keynote speaker, well-known in the field, broadcasted the event far and wide, and eventually raised over $12K. Over 200 people attended, including a couple of dozen visitors, and some of our external sponsors - including BPS - even came in and joined the fun. Despite a few hiccups and headaches, it was a success, and the symposium has since been continued by succeeding generations of graduate students.

I bring this up because I spent some time today to reflect on my scientific journey and where both the event and the annual meeting have taken me. At that event five years ago, by virtue of my role as an organizer, I got to spend a fair bit of time with our keynote speaker. We connected over shared interests, and I visited his lab a few months later. A short while after that I joined his lab as a postdoc, and yesterday afternoon I presented my postdoc work at the annual meeting for the first time. In the intervening years, I've had the chance, as part of my postdoctoral projects, to work with many excellent researchers across the world, and was able to meet some of them here.

Through organizing that event five years ago, I spent a fair bit of time connecting with corporate donors and other sponsors, and got to know some of them well enough to make friends. We stayed in touch over the years due to mutual interests, and I'd occasionally meet them on site visits to our institution. Over the past couple of days at the meeting, I had a chance to meet all of them in person again.  

I even met my undergraduate research advisor yesterday, the person who got me started in structural biology research. Everyone comes to the BPS annual meeting.

The point is, I can draw a line from that time to now, from seeds planted back then to fruits borne today, each decision leading to a cascade of unintended little consequences that worked out in ways that I could not even account for. I could see and feel many of those consequences today, as though I was viewing the last few years in four-dimensional space, seeing the past and present simultaneously. If only I could see the future with the same sort of clarity.

I'm slowly belaboring to the point: I think all of us are conditioned into thinking of the importance of networking. We hear about it all the time: in graduate school, conferences, in journals, and even social media. We network to get jobs, both in industry and academia, obtain grants, and even publish papers. It's important, and we all get that by now. And yet, it's neither easy nor does it come naturally to many of us, and certainly not for me. I am painfully shy and not particularly forthcoming with new people. Still, sometimes those opportunities occur organically when we are simply playing to our strengths. Thus, be it writing a blog, volunteering to organize a symposium, staying in touch with a former advisor or mentor, or any other extracurricular activity, you might meet people who transform your life in unexpected and significant ways. So, my friends, here's to making new connections, strengthening old bonds, and tons of great new science at BPS2020.