As usual, it was an exciting and exhausting ACS meeting. Our sessions were good. The poster session seemed to be pretty well attended, but I admit, it was hard to judge that based on the location of our posters. For the second straight year I had hotel issues; last year it was a power outage and this year an evacuation due to the fire alarm going off. We had an excellent social gathering at the Pin-Up thanks to Anne Bentley. I even got to sneak off to Oakland to see an Angels-A's game. But enough about me, I want to focus on the experience of my students.

I brought three students to San Francisco this year, two juniors and a sophomore. I was quite nervous on the flight out because I hadn't quite been able to prep them as much as I would have liked due to a variety of circumstances. After a bumpy 20 minute flight from Allentown to Philadelphia, we had about 3 hours to kill before getting on the plane for San Francisco. We spent a good portion of that time doing final preparations for the conference. One of the juniors would be giving a talk in our Sunday afternoon session and the other two students were giving posters Sunday night. It was clear that the reality of actually going to the meeting was starting to hit them and they were starting to get nervous. We had a really good conversation and I assured them that they were ready. I laid out my expectations that they had to show up to their presentations and that it would be good form to stay through the entire session in which the one student was giving an oral presentation. Other than that, they were on their own. I suggested it would be good to go to other talks to hear about other chemistry and that they should go to the EXPO to get SWAG. 

The good news is they showed up to their presentations, and, in my opinion, did a really nice job. Other than that, I am not entirely sure what they were up to. I've occasionally thought it might be nice to have a Find My Student App, but the more I think about it, the less appealing that sounds. I do know they did a SWAG run through the EXPO. I also know there was a stop at some kind of Ghirardelli location. Otherwise, I am only sure that they caught their flight on Tuesday and made it back to campus ok.

I asked them to reflect on their experience and they gave me some very good feedback. Here are some of the things they gave me to think about.

• "I wish they had more time there." It is always a challenge with them missing classes and labs as well as dealing with the cost. Maybe I'll try and get there Friday night next spring so they have a day to see the city.

• "I wish I would have went to more talks related to topics outside of inorganic chemistry." I am not sure why anyone would say this. Perhaps next year I will do a quick meeting of how to use the App and/or program book to map out your meeting. I think I trusted them to figure it out on their own a little too much.

• "I didn't learn a lot from the poster presentations, because research was so specific/over my head and the students were hard to talk to." This is an interesting comment. I am not sure how to address it. The student that made this comment has not taken an inorganic chemistry course at all, so I think part of the issue lies there. I feel like one of my other students had a very different experience based on reports of talking with people about lots of different types of research and being excited by what they are doing. 

• "Presenting my own poster was really cool, and I became more comfortable with my own research through doing so." Yay! This is one of the main goals so I am glad it worked out.

You may have noticed I asked them to reflect on their experience as opposed to telling me what the best part of the trip was. Unfortunately, I know how they would have answered the later question. Without a doubt they would have unanimously said 'Meeting Miranda Cosgrove' who starred in the Nickelodeon show iCarley, which was quite popular when they were tweens. For those of you that don't know Nickelodeon shows from the late 00's, that's Miranda on the left with my two Nicoles, and Roxy Swail's student Stavros.