APS March Meeting @Minneapolis

This year in March, I joined two mega-conferences; APS (American Physical Societ) March Meeting and DPG (Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft) Spring Meeting. The APS took place at Minneapolis in the US, and the DPG took place at Berlin in Germany.

For the APS, which was my first time, I had the following impressions:

• There’re a lot of people from many countries! People are very diverse.
• The spirit is quite similar to other annual main annual conferences, like KPS (Korean Physical Society) and DPG. But the APS is definitely the biggest.
• You have chances to meet nearly anyone. If you want to discuss with a researcher whom you like from their works, you can simply search and contact by email. Likewise, if people know you, your works, and that you present at the conference, they will reach you by email or in the session, etc. This is in fact the aspect that I liked the most from the APS.
• Because it’s one of the biggest events in physics, you can meet old friends and colleagues. I met my classmates and alumni from the former group and spent good evenings together.
• Our symposium on orbitronics (organized by Vivek Amin and Felix Casanova) was quite successful! Despite it was on the last day, many people still remained.
• The discussions I had with colleagues in my research field on the last two days were very helpful and valuable.

Side remarks:

• On the last day, after the symposium, some of the speakers of the sessions explored the city together in the afternoon. We went to a modern art museum, Weisman Art Museum. I was in fact a bit worried because I sometimes don’t really understand much, but this time most of pieces were very accessible and even interactive (like smell, touch, and play)!
• After walking along the Mississippi river (not so nice, unfortunately, and the road was really not for pedestrians), we were lucky to have found a table in a native American Indian restaurants. Wow, I tried the meat from Bison and Elk for the first time. And they were very tasty, in fact!
• Unfortunately, Minneapolis wasn’t the best city. Well, like most other cities in the US, each block was so huge to walk. The city isn’t made for pedestrians but for cars. In some part of the city, I felt even unsafe — I could not see anyone but drug addicts, and a few “normal” people walked really fast by ignoring things around. For me, who grew up in Korea and live in Germany now, it was simply stressful that I should think about this kind of things.