Every Year at Exchange, each track has 3 (or 5 in the case of instrumentation) papers that are nominated as “Best In Conference”   The abstracts for these papers are shown on boards—usually somewhere nearly the dining area as well as in the printed material.   On Thursday during lunch we present the awards for Best in Conference.    Do you ever wonder how these papers are selected or how the final decisions are made?  Enquireing minds want to know!

 

One of the biggest tasks of your Emerson Exchange Board of Directors is making sure there is good program for the exchange.   When I say program,  I’m talking about all the workshops and short courses. Soon after one year’s exchange, we meet to work on the next exchange.   On thing that happens in that early meeting is we choose which tracks we will be mentoring for the next year.  Each track has at least two mentors.   These mentors job is to review all the abstracts after the submission deadline in March.   We receive somewhere around two papers for every time slot we can fill, so this is a hard job.   And we are not looking at full presentations, just an abstract—a few short sentances about what the paper is about.  Obviously, this is not the time to be selecting Best in Conference.

 

Later, in July after the deadline for the first full presentation upload we review all the presentations in their entirety.   Some are great and are immediately accepted.   Some need some review and are accepted with comments to review while others need more work—to make longer, make shorter or to get back on track so they are actually like the abstract that we acccepted.   After the first deadline to get comments back to our speakers when a majority of the papers are in their final or near final form, we make our selections for best in conference.   Each track is done a little differently since we have different mentors in each track—but it is about the same.   Each mentor selects the papers that they feel are the best from all that were submitted.  Then the mentors get together to compare their selections and pick the final three papers.  You would be surprised how close they are—often the selected papers are exact matches for at least two of the three choices.

 

Finally, the track mentors go to the presentations in their track at exchange and especially the ones that are selected as best in track.    Now we are considering the abstract, the full presentation and finally how well it was actually presented by the speakers.   Once more we make our personal selections, then compare notes between the mentors and make the final decision, which is reveiled at the Thursday lunchen.

 

So how do you get to be a best in conference speaker?  Easy as 1, 2, 3.  1—Submit a great abstract.  2—Submit your final powerpoint presentation by the  July deadline complete and ready for final.  3—Wow the room at conference with an rivioting presentation.  It’s that easy!