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 Preparing for the Baltimore Meeting
By Alex Dickison, Vice President and Program Chair
January 15, 2008
Happy New Year! The coming of the New Year is a harbinger that the AAPT Winter Meeting in Baltimore is just around the corner. For years I attended the winter meetings and never realized the planning and preparation it takes to put together an Annual Meeting. This is my first meeting as Program Chair and I have found out by experience what it takes. I would like to share what I learned with you so you can have some appreciation of the efforts that go into organizing a meeting of this kind.
Choosing the meeting site is done years in advance. I was not involved in the decision to have the meeting in Baltimore, so I won’t go into details about it here. I do know it takes a great deal of research and negotiation by our Programs and Meetings staff in the Central Office, before a meeting site is chosen. Recently a special Meetings Committee has been formed led by Past President Dick Peterson to help in this important task regarding future meetings.
Planning for the sessions and workshops at the Baltimore meeting started a year ago at the Seattle meeting. The source for the ideas and topics of the sessions and workshops are the Area Committees’ responsibility. AAPT has 18 Area Committees, each charged with proposing and carrying out projects or programs in different areas of physics teaching. At each area committee meeting in Seattle, volunteers were found to organize a session or workshop. Each committee decided which sessions or workshops they would like to sponsor.
After all the Area Committees had a chance to meet, near the end of the meeting, all the area chairs got together in a meeting called the Programs Committee. At this meeting the session and workshop ideas were shared so cooperation and co-sponsors could be found.
The next deadline was in March, when the committee chairs submitted to the Program Chair the proposed sessions and workshops and their organizers. This is where the meeting starts to take shape. Due to the number of meeting rooms and time slots a prioritization took place. Some of the sessions were for contributed papers and so “calls for papers” that were proposed had to be prepared and submitted so they could appear on the AAPT website.
The story picks up again at the Summer Meeting in Greensboro. Here the area committees confirmed that the volunteers were ready to organize the proposed sessions and workshops. By the end of the summer meeting this list was finalized and it was time for the organizers to begin their work.
During the next two months the organizers, Area Committee Chairs, Awards Committee, and Program Chair had a great deal to do. The organizers and Program Chair needed to line up the invited speakers and workshop leaders as well as making sure they submitted their abstracts. The Awards Committee needed to confirm the awardees and the Program Chair had to line up the plenary speakers.
During this same time, members were submitting contributed papers (either talks or posters). Some of these were in answer to the call for papers organized by the Area Committees, but many were on other topics of physics teaching.
The last step in this puzzle took place at the paper sort at the Central Office during the first weekend in October. Here the Program Chair and four Area Committee Chairs placed each paper, poster, and workshop in a timeslot. After this was done, times had to be found for crackerbarrels and committee meetings. This was an almost impossible task considering the number of rooms and times available. Conflicts and problems are going to occur and hopefully attendees and presenters will understand.
All of this only concerned the work of AAPT volunteers. I did not try to explain the hard work of the AAPT Central Office Staff. I know the help and support they gave me. I know the materials they developed. I can only imagine the hard work and how much time they spent putting together this Baltimore Meeting. This is the first Annual Meeting that Tiffany Hayes, Director of Programs and Meetings is responsible for. I think she did a wonderful job considering all there is to learn. I also think the publicity by the Marketing Department was super. Be sure to thank everyone on the AAPT Staff for their hard work in Baltimore.
See you there next week!
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