That was on the very last day of the very first week of last semester, when I had to skip all of my classes on Friday to catch the flight to Baltimore for a conference. I had a presentation about my research, and I was also a chair of the ODE (Ordinary Differential Equation) session at Joint Mathematics Meeting (JMM) in Baltimore. I was super duper excited about it as I had never done anything like this before. Additionally, knowing that JMM is the largest annual meeting of mathematicians in the world, and it is the largest gathering of mathematicians in America made me even more nervous, and I couldn’t even sleep the night before my flight.
I landed on Baltimore at around 8 AM and had a small trip around the city.
Then, I dropped by the Convention Center to have a sense of how a national conference looked like, how people dressed up and how others’ presentations were. Although I just attended the last two days of a week long conference, I got to meet a lot of ‘cool’ people, whose names are everywhere on mathematics articles and textbooks. There were also hundreds of workshops, panels and talks about different research topics such as applications of differential equations in economics, electrodynamics, epidemiology, etc.
The night before my presentation, I got an inclement weather alert, saying that there were snow storms in Baltimore, Cincinnati and many other cities. Everyone I know had their flights got cancelled, and they tried to book another ticket but they were all cancelled. My professor had to get a train ticket to go back to Boston. However, my flight was still “ON TIME,” and it made me feel extra nervous. I talked to my professor to see if I should cancel the presentation and fly home before the storm started, but we eventually decided to stay and give a talk anyways.
*Me still giving my presentation even though it was windy and raining crazily outside
I was then on the airplane with around 20 people. And yes, it was a tiny little airplane, so I felt like it was dancing on the sky. I pretended that I was sleeping, and the turbulence was just in a dream. And on my way from the airport to my house, the bus driver drove super slow, around 20mph, on the highway. I eventually made it home safety. I felt like I loved Cincinnati, loved my roommate, loved my bed and loved everything more than ever before after that trip.
To sum up, I had so much fun and learned a lot from the conference. Even if the weather was not as good as I expected, my presentation went pretty well. It was a really good time and good experience.
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