Hi all, soon I’ll be heading to a conference, and as an immature PhD student, I’m always eager to hear the most scandalous and juicy conference stories. Did you ever get up to something lovey-dovey at a conference? Or have you heard other juicy stories from colleagues? Please share and have a great Friday night! 🙂
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Not scandalous per se, but at a Denver conference (Sheraton Downtown) a guy who’d been secretly living above the ceiling of a restaurant attached to the lobby fell through the ceiling. He broke a sprinkler line, flooded the lobby, then got stuck in the wall and had to be cut out by firefighters. Whole thing played out in front of a lobby full of conference-goers.
I’ve been and know colleagues who’ve attended conferences (Within the past 3 years) where someone has died.
There was a shooting on the street in front of my conference building one year. It was during lunch and several attendees had to shelter in various restaurants and fast food locations.
I think you might be really disappointed. In 30 years the biggest scandal has been the decline in coffee budgets.
Professor had a secret story with a student 13yo younger than him for months. They knew it was time to end it. So at the conference they spent a day together, went fine dining, then went to his hotel, spent the night there when they did an LSD trip, amazing sex, and Polaroid photos. Morning after at the conference he was crying in secret because that was the end. Still managed to attend the talks. It wasn’t the end, by the way.
I went to a conference where we were invited out by some of the other trainees, who went to the basement of a bar and started taking off their clothes. I don’t know what happened after that because I heard this story from another trainee who fled
APSA on fire https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/09/02/political-science-meeting-interrupted-hotel-fire
Fire alarm during conference job interviews.
The infamous paper airplane balcony incident that involved several senior scholars and hotel security.
You learn who washes their hands, and who doesn’t.
One guy around 40 was a known alcoholic. Everyone went home and he stayed in the hotel bar. I heard he got wasted, lost his laptop, and tried to hit on some random teenage girl who was hanging out on the street.
Haven’t witnessed a spicy story yet, but I think romantic encounters must be frequent.
Might sound like bragging. I’ve been stared at by a couple women during the conference (one of which got angry after I didn’t make a move, since I’m not single), a married one attempted to flirt with me during socialization time after conference hours.
It makes sense. People have access to free alcohol, hotel food while being nicely dressed meeting people they probably will never see again.
Active shooter alert during a Gordon Conference, we had to sit quietly in the auditorium until it passed. Not the most fun!
There was an accidental shooting in the lobby of the conference hotel.
It didn’t happen to me, but at my first conference I witnessed another 1st year PhD student being ripped to shreds by an old PI during the Q&A part of her talk, because she already had some good results, but he wanted to make a point she didn’t do all of it herself (as nobody does nowadays in my field anymore 🙄).
It was painful to watch, imo he embarrassed himself more than the PhD student who couldn’t answer half of the questions, and it gave me a glimpse into one of many, many problems academia has.
ETA: Ok, reading some other stories, mine is really not scandalous 😂 But I was quite shocked by the public humiliation and no other older professors stopping the uncomfortable situation.
My buddy told me he met his academic hero at a conference. They went out for drinks and the dude got shitfaced and took a dump on the sidewalk.
Not Scandalous, but…stressful? First panel of the morning, a grad student on new medication hadn’t eaten properly. He got 1/3 of the way through a presentation on the Gothic novel The Monk, made a dramatic pause, and went into a seizure. The speaker next to him caught him as he fell. Suddenly a room full of PhDs are trying to call 911 from deep inside a conference center with no cellphone service. We finally got help through the room phone. There was no Q&A for that panel.
Ever since I was a grad student, I’ve seen a lot of gross senior men hitting on female grad students and postdocs at the social functions that happen in the evening. It was gross then, it’s even more gross now that I’m older and really appreciate just how out of line that is, given the power differential.
Not very scandalous but… at my first international conference with an extremely huge attendance, I was supposed to do a 15 minute oral presentation to a ballroom full of 500 people. My dumb over enthusiastic graduate student ass did not think about my stage fright before selecting the oral instead of the poster presentation. Anyways, I was freaking out the days leading up to my presentation and it was on the later days of the conference. On the day before my presentation, I was attending another session and one of the presenters also a graduate student went on stage during her turn, started talking, had a panic attack episode and starting saying loudly -‘ I can’t do this’ , ‘I can’t do this’! Poor girl, everyone mostly understood and were sympathetic and she was escorted out of the room by her PI. My PI told me as long as I didn’t faint or do that I was golden.. no matter how the presentation went. It went good.
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Don’t know if it counts as “juicy,” but the most scandalous was probably the case of sexual assault. This was just before #metoo and the guy – shamefully – escaped with merely a stern warning.
I’m an early career researcher and had the opportunity to co-chair a session with a very famous professor in my field (like, >100k citations). He had an invited talk in the following session in my subfield, which he didn’t normally work in. He told me about his concept, which didn’t make much sense to me but this dude was a true giant in the field, so I assumed I was just too stupid to get it.
At his talk, he proposed a device that converted heat directly to electricity. Like, a textbook violation of the second law of thermodynamics. The questions afterwards were awkward, a real emperor’s new clothes moment.
As a nosy person, I’m so here for this post 😂☕️🫖