 But please note that there's a lot of us who want to make this a success and want you to come back next year when hopefully we can come together. Hello fellow astronomers, welcome back to another annual tradition by How to Get Ready for the AAAS meeting video. Now I've done these videos in the past and you can go back and watch those. There's good tips, there's good advice about how to attend a conference in those old videos. In just a few weeks, a few thousand astronomers are going to be participating in one of the largest virtual meetings that I've ever seen. The 237th meeting of the American Astronomical Society will be all online, all virtual this year of course. Now preparing for a big meeting is always a lot of work and preparing for anything during the pandemic takes a lot of effort and a lot of intentionality. Putting those ideas together I wanted to share a few tips for how to prepare for this virtual meeting with the caveat that this is difficult and it will be imperfect. So this is as much advice to myself as it's advice to anyone else. Six tips for surviving the virtual AAAS meeting. Alright, tip number one for all virtual events is try logging in before the event. So in this case, there's going to be a Zoom link sent out or maybe a million Zoom links. I don't know exactly how it's going to work. There's a virtual conference platform which I haven't tried before and importantly, there's a Slack channel. If you're registered for the meeting, you should have gotten an invite already for this Slack channel. I see as of the time I'm filming this, 2,120 or so people are on this new Slack. And you know, there's going to be some like hiccups with this new Slack. If you're new to Slack, definitely download it now and play with it and figure it out. If you're experienced with Slack, you're going to be a little overwhelmed by all the automatic subscriptions that got put in. Right now, everybody gets subscribed to a channel for every single session. There's like three or four hundred of them. It's a lot. If you want to get rid of a few of these channels or maybe a few hundred of these channels, the best way is to go into the channel browser and you can kind of quickly leave lots of channels that don't interest you. Okay. While the overwhelming Slack situation is a bit, well, overwhelming, it does nicely tie into my number two tip, which is be prepared. Do some planning. Spend some time looking at the schedule, thinking about what sessions you want to participate in. A good way to figure out what you might be interested in is to go through and clean up the Slack channels that you don't care about. Tip number three, set aside time to actually do this conference. Now when a conference is in your hometown, like double S was a couple of years ago here in Seattle, it's really hard to separate home life from conference life. When you get on an airplane and fly somewhere, it's much easier to put yourself fully engaged and fully present in that space. This year, we are all in our houses, in our basements, in our home offices or our kitchen tables. This is very difficult for separating conference mindset from life mindset. It might be very hard for advisors or teachers to let you miss classes or miss your duties because you're at a conference. For a lot of people, it's not possible to draw this line. It's not possible to completely shut out what you need to be doing. For myself, I've got children. I'm going to have childcare duties. I'm going to have to schedule with my partner and with my family times that I need to give my presentations, to be involved in events that I'm participating in. And then there's going to be large chunks of time during the conference that I can't participate. And that's okay. As you're working on number two of planning and preparing, think about number three of setting aside time to be present. All right. Tip number four is actually a tip that I gave last year. Go to at least one big talk a day and try to talk to at least one new person every day. Now during a virtual conference, chatting with someone might actually just mean chatting on Slack or attending something on Zoom. But try to meet new people. The point of these conferences is to network and to get new ideas. And it'll be really easy to like tune out and skip things. Try to at least attend and watch one big talk or one session every day and try to find somebody to talk to. Okay. Tip number five, which is again a great tip for any conference or really just life in general. Define your own success. This year I'm not giving a big talk. I have very few things that I've signed up for because I'm already anticipating not having as much time to participate as I want. But I've got some new events that I want to go to. And I really want to make some of these iPoster interactions positive. Success for me is going to be trying to spend a little time every day engaging in this conference. Success doesn't have to be attend every single talk. But if your goal is to attend as many as possible, then awesome. Go for it. And spend your own sense of success in this conference. And tip number six is so vital during the Zoom pandemic era. Be patient and be forgiving with yourself and with this whole situation. We all have to like buy in and participate and play along if this is going to work. If we're impatient with each other, if we're frustrated, we're just going to tune out and throw our hands up and just say, but I think if we all try and we're all patient and empathetic and kind to each other, then maybe this conference can be a huge success. If you've never attended WAS before, I'm sorry that this is your first experience to this amazing community. But please know that there's a lot of us who want to make this a success and want you to come back next year when hopefully we can come together. Okay, have a great new year. I'll see you all at the virtual WAS. I don't know if I'll be able to make a daily vlog. Having to split my time being a parent, I'm also not exactly sure what content to film since I'm just stuck in this room. If you are not attending but you'd like to watch wrap ups or there's something that I can show that would be interesting, let me know. Leave me a comment. And I know I haven't been posting a lot of these videos in 2020 because but if you're watching these videos, remember to hit the subscribe button or leave me a comment or let me know somehow. It means a lot to me. Okay, I'll see you all in 2021.