I attended the AAPM annual meeting for the first time in July 2024. It was a mix of totally awesome and totally overwhelming.

Abstract Submission

When I first started residency, getting more involved in AAPM and attending at least one meeting was one of my major goals. I was very motivated to attend the annual meeting this year because I wanted to get experience presenting my work. I feel like presentation skills are very useful in general and it’s something I want to continue to work on since I have pretty severe public speaking anxiety.

I submitted my abstract in February then got news that it was accepted for a 10 minute oral presentation in May. This was my first time submitting an abstract for a conference, so I was overjoyed that it was accepted. I wasn’t super familiar with the abstract submission process, so it was a little bit daunting to figure out how to word everything and which figures to include. Regardless of the outcome, the process of submitting an abstract for review was a great experience and I’m glad that I have it in my toolbelt now.

The Conference

The conference ran from a Sunday to a Thursday. “Wow that’s a really long conference,” said every non-medical physicist I talked to about this conference. Yeah it was really long. This was compounded by the fact that my presentation was on the last day.

The public speaking dread was hanging over my shoulders the whole time, but I tried my best to power through. My conference attendance style, I have learned, involves going to far more sessions than is probably healthy. If there were interesting talks at 7:30 AM, I was usually there. The later talks ended at 6:30 PM so I was pretty exhausted almost immediately on the first day. On top of the sessions, there was so much to look at in the exhibit hall. I didn’t leave myself much time to explore Los Angeles, but I grew up in the area so it didn’t feel super dire to sightsee.

I thought it was great that there were new attendee orientations where first time attendees could talk to more senior members of AAPM. A piece of advice they gave us was to not spend too much time at the sessions (oops), and instead leave yourself time for networking in between sessions. They also suggested talking to the vendors and asking them a lot of questions, which felt intimidating at first, but all of the vendors I spoke to were really friendly. (I didn’t even feel like anyone was trying to sell me anything. Maybe they could sense my lack of purchasing power.) Overall, it was really fun listening to cool talks, connecting with new people, and reuniting with friends from grad school.

I really struggled the day of my talk because I was too nervous to eat much and I couldn’t focus at all. I remember attending a talk about QC for SPECT-CT systems, but my mentor will not be particularly impressed with my performance going into my nucmed rotation based solely on how much I retained from that talk. And that’s not to fault the speaker at all because he was great, I was just on another planet. If it seems like I’m going too far into the gory details of my mental health, it’s only in hopes that someone else with a similar public speaking fear can read this and feel less alone in the world. I used to teach labs as a grad student and for the first three or so class sessions, my legs would shake when I stood in front of the class. That’s how fried I get from public speaking. Long story short, I felt like I was going to pass out the entire session leading up to my talk. Despite this, once the session organizer announced my name, I felt totally fine and gave my talk as practiced. Not ideal, but I did it!