By Joseph Gaudard
The European Geosciences Union Annual Meeting is a major conference in natural science, and a good place to present “almost finished work”. It is also a terrifying event, with about 20’000 participants on site.
In 2024, I was a first time attendee going there alone. It was a lonely week of failed networking and quiet lunch breaks. I took notes of my mistakes and when I applied for funding to go again in 2025, I promised a deliverable in the shape of a toolbox for early career researcher going to a big conference for the first time.
So, here it is. I have made it as a github repo with a GPL-3.0 licence, with the idea that people can fork it and adapt it for themselves. It contains a tutorial to make a CV as a github page, with a QR code linking to it, a tool I find convenient when networking. It also contains my “conference DOs” and a conference bingo of action points to aim for.So did I do better this time? Yes. I had planned who I wanted to meet, which snowballed in meeting more people, and I turned my week into a networking marathon. The only “conference DON’Ts” I had written down in 2024 and redid in 2025 was “writing a grant application during the conference”, but hey, deadlines…
https://github.com/jogaudard/ecr_toolbox