Quality control

There was a side discussion that blew up a bit in last week's Ask a Manager, and now that I'm actually at a computer and can type, I can't find it. Anywhoo, there was a dispute regarding academic vs. industrial quality control.

As a scientist who has done reasonably similar work both in grad school and at work, there is no comparison. Academia just doesn't have the same controls compared to even the cheapest, lowest common denominator fieldwork in the environmental business.

If we do a site investigation, we have at least some basic standard operating procedures (SOPs) that are listed or referred to so that anyone can see what we were supposed to be doing. The samples remain under chain of custody to ensure that there's no tampering. The samples go to a laboratory that's been accredited to run those particular analyses, and then we get a lab report that either is included or is referred to and is available upon request. Any report, no matter the size, gets at least one review by someone who didn't write the report/pull together the tables and figures. And then the client gets a crack at it, and then the regulator(s) can comment. Even a simple real estate transaction between two private parties can get escalated if sampling turns up concentrations higher than certain thresholds, and you can be sure that any follow-up sampling from that will have lots of scrutiny.

Once you start entering into the realm of Real Money, feisty stakeholders (such as irritated and well-educated neighbors), and litigation, it gets much more involved. The folks doing the actual sampling may be overseen by a third party in the field, which may collect their own sample sets (split sampling) and send to their own labs. You may have consultants retained by the polluter, the neighbors, the town where the contamination is (or at least the board of health), and environmental/health advocacy groups, all with their own agendas, poring over the data and coming to their own conclusions. Quality control and documentation becomes critical for everything. Academia just doesn't compare to this.

old-time academic burn

Sometimes my work leads me in interesting directions. Working in East Coast Big City means that I occasionally deal with contamination that is centuries old. And because geology doesn't necessarily change that much in a few centuries, occasionally I end up digging into papers and manuscripts that are more than 100 years old.

One particular thesis had some pretty sharp opinions on previous work. I've redacted it because it's subject is too close to my current work, but you'll get the gist:

"[Previous investigators' work] I am unable to accept, on the palpable errors in their field investigations. I do not believe that [this correlation] is to be accepted. I dissent from the conclusions of these papers, because the structure of this region has been worked out along untenable lines. Professor X makes the assertion that the cleavage and bedding practically coincide, and my own observations disprove this statement. Professor Y, who has been able to recognize these two structures, has evidently not made any use of the information."

I shall endeavor to work "has evidently not made any use of this information" into my next set of review comments.

journal access woes

I research various topics on a regular basis. My first preference is a recent (within, say, the last five years) guidance document or white paper from a federal government agency or research lab. Next would be technical guidance from the state the project is in, or a state in the same region.

The problem is, though, that if it's a research project that I'm working on (as opposed to an intern or entry level scientist), I'm usually in much deeper and am working with more technical details: which equation would be better for this application? Are there any specific chemical/physical/biological reactions that I need to figure out? That's when I need to start trawling through the journal articles. And most of the time, the sorts of details I'm looking for are in the meat of the article and aren't listed in the abstract.

There has to be a happy medium between open access (free!) and paying $35 for an article that I don't even know will be useful until I've paid for it. I can get a few articles here and there that have been posted by the authors or are actually open access. Some of my colleagues have memberships that come with journal access and they can send me stuff. But I can't justify the cost of spending a couple of hundred bucks to trace a possible dead end.

In grad school, our print shop had an arrangements with the publishers that they would copy journal articles, charge us a reasonable price (I think it was a buck or so a page), and send on the royalties as appropriate. I don't get why the publishers can't charge a more reasonable price (say, $5) for a reasonably short article. I'd be able to actually pay for quite a bit more if I could do so in smaller increments.

the hawaiian shirt crew

I haven't told a random school story in a long time...

I mentioned before that I didn't really fit into my undergrad geology department. Part of the problem was possibly my own class-based awareness/resentment. The whole thing came to a head right at the end of my senior year.

The geology department had a field study course requirement. The department would alternate between a "cheap" (a couple hundred dollars extra) field course and a "fun" (sky was the limit) field course annually. They were pretty damn breezy about how one was to pay for the "fun" field course, and so I did the cheap one. Fine.

So one year the fun field course was in Hawaii. All the "cool kids" who made up the core of the "real geology students" went and they had a great time, all sorts of bonding, etc. They all came back with Hawaiian shirts, and the shirts became a sort of symbol of the department.

I went to a small liberal arts school (SLAC) which was inundated with long-running, somewhat quirky traditions. One of those traditions was that the president of the school held a series of dinner parties with the seniors, organized by department or group of departments. It was considered a breach of etiquette not to attend, but I had no interest in mingling with people who'd made it clear I didn't fit in, so I skipped it. As it turned out, the other students who were also on the outs with the department mostly skipped it as well.

Word had gone around to "the cool kids" that all the geology department folks (including the professors) were to wear Hawaiian shirts to the dinner party. Nobody told me; I heard about all this later from students in other departments. So most of the department, including all the professors, came to the dinner party wearing Hawaiian shirts. And the few who didn't, because they weren't told about the arrangement, got teased mercilessly by all the other students for not matching the rest of the department. Fun party.

Those damn Hawaiian shirts precipitated my complete break with the rest of the geology department. But that's ok; I persevered without any institutional or educational support. And I'm still out here, poking at rocks, doing cool science even if I never did become one of the cool kids.

paper authorship

Dynamic Ecology has a recent post up regarding awesome ways to decide paper authorship (bribe? coin flip? brownie bake-off?).

My academic paper had a pretty standard order, based on contribution: primary/thesis student (me), supporting/project student, supervising professor, technical advisor professor. I did most of the work and wrote the first draft based on discussions with our advisor (supervising professor), the other student added in her section and revised/tweaked my text as needed, and then I sent it over to the supervising professor and technical advisor professor for review, and we went around a bit to clean it up and force it into the correct format.

There was no disagreement (or even discussion, really) regarding the order of authorship on our paper. The project student and I were working on similar aspects of the same general research area under the same grant, so our work had been coordinated reasonably well from the beginning. My advisor and the technical professor were both old long-established academics, and this particular paper wasn't going to set the academic world on fire - we were masters students developing some side aspects of a long-running research program.

If I do write another paper, though, it will be as part of a team of near-equal contributors and a veritable army of support staff. I'm not a particularly fancy cook, but I like the idea of using a quasi-random method to determine authorship. Fantasy football, maybe?

ResearchGate?

I've been getting the odd invitation to join ResearchGate ever since my journal article* was published.

My paper is not going to set the world on fire, but more than 5 years after publication, I'm still getting a few pageviews a month and the odd citation. As I mentioned here, the paper hasn't had much of an impact on my post-graduate career, other than the fact that it looks nice on a résumé.

I have no intention of going back to grad school. I also don't have any future papers planned - I do present at the odd conference, but I'm not in a place where I'm advancing the science to the extent that I could get a paper out of it. And my existing paper is already open-access. So would joining an academic network really do much for me or for the general public?

I'm already a piss-poor correspondent and facebook/linkedin updater. I'm not all that interested in committing to yet another social media outlet when I barely use the two that everyone else seems to be on. But maybe I'm just an unsocial crank. Readers, do you use ResearchGate at all, and do you find it useful compared to other networking sites like linkedin?

* as with most academic papers, it wasn't mine alone - I was first/corresponding author, but it was a group effort.

Non-academic bloggery

Jeremy Fox has a recent post that discusses reasons for starting a science blog... or for not starting a science blog. The Dynamic Ecology blog is a group effort, but the group consists of academics. As a non-academic (industry) blogger, I had a different set of issues to contend with when starting to put my ideas out for public consumption.

Public outreach: I don't have any metrics or get any "points" for public outreach. I like public outreach, and I enjoy being out there in the field as a visible lady scientist, and I'm happy to answer any and all questions while I'm working (to the extent possible). But my job doesn't have any components at all related to educating the general population about scientific topics. It would occupy the same space on my résumé as volunteering for the local food bank - a nice do-gooder hobby that would only be useful in that it could be thought of as a form of networking. So, blogging wouldn't help my career that way.

Research publicity: One of the big differences between academia and industry is the focus of the science/research. In academia, I could work on my own thing and (at least in theory) be beholden only to Science. I work for a client, and my work product is owned by the firm. Depending on what I'm doing, my work may end up in the public domain in the form of public documents/filings. But the actual intellectual work - the arguing over cause/effect, the loose ends that need to be explained, the division of the workload, the polishing of the text? All that messy stuff is hashed out in private among a group of scientists prior to document finalization, whether that document is a memo to the file, a letter to a regulator/opposing counsel, or a big report. For me, there is no upside and a whole world of hurt if I publish internal deliberations for a recognizable product.

That's ok. I'm having fun over here even though my blogging will likely never have a positive career impact - it isn't intended to.

"free" conference

I was still technically part of a research group after I'd finished grad school. The primary grant that I had worked under had a few stipulations, one of which was that the research group would present the findings of the work at x number of national/international conferences. The grant-giving organization had money set aside specifically for the conference attendance, and to make a long story short, I was the only one available to give the presentation.

I had just started a new job. Conference attendance wouldn't be a problem, right? After all, my travel and conference costs were entirely covered. Plus, as a newly-minted employee, I would be representing my new firm as a technical expert at big conference (related to that industry).

Not so much. New employer was fixated on the three days of admin/non-billable work that they'd need to pay me to fly out and give the presentation, so I ended up promising that I would squash three days of overtime into two weeks to avoid any extra admin charges.

I was wiped out by that overtime, plus the presentation prep time (also not allowed to be charged to the firm), and so I didn't do any actual conference networking to support my new employer.

I thought that the firm was outrageously short-sighted for not wanting to take advantage of a (mostly) free conference. I eventually figured out the office politics around having a brand-new employee jet off to a fancy conference (even though it was my research), and considered myself lucky to be allowed to go.

Now if I have a conference I'd like to attend, I make sure to have a business case for going and not just argue that I can give a cool presentation. I do miss grad school in that respect - as a grad student, I'd be able to take a free conference in a heartbeat, and not worry about more complicated financial/business development considerations.

worst science grades

Geologists/scientists, did you have any terrible grades in a science class? This post discusses lousy grades from an academic's (ecology) perspective.

In college, I caught fire in chemistry, stunk up my math classes, did ok in my geology classes, and was generally a better student in my non-major classes. That post I referred to also discussed my lousy high school science classes, which temporarily convinced me that I couldn't hack "real science", so I won't rehash high school here. In the end, I got school honors as an undergrad, but not department honors. I didn't have that singular lousy grade, though.

When I was a senior in college and trying to figure out what to do next, I thought that only brilliant people who got all As were "allowed" into graduate school. None of my professors seemed to think I was good enough. Nobody said, "hey, have you considered grad school?" It didn't occur to me until much later that the only students from my department who went to grad school right from college were clearly preferred by the professors, who were aggressively "outdoorsy", dominated the class discussions, and generally sucked all the oxygen out of the room from those of us who were more reserved or unsure of ourselves.

Here's the thing. One bad grade won't keep you from being a stellar academic. One bad undergrad experience won't keep you from getting where you want to go, whether that's a "hard" science or academia, or somewhere else. I used to work with a science expert who had flunked out of college entirely. It may take some hard work initially. Maybe you need to build an industry reputation. Maybe you take a couple years to take (or re-take) some classes. But there are no iron gates preventing you from getting the experience/grades/confidence to get to the next step, whether it's academia or industry.

the great outoors

While I was writing this post, I was wrestling with issues of privilege and class. I've always been wary of condescension when working around folks living in rural poverty, or folks who chose a lifestyle that mimics that rural poverty, such as survivalists. The original post that I had linked to had some of that condescension, and possibly one reason it prompted so much discussion.

I grew up in a suburban, relatively wealthy town. At the same time, most of my extended family lived in a rough part of the city. We don't like to talk about class in the US, but it exists. I lived in a world where you fought for the best education and had to get into a "good school" (not public) so you get an advanced degree, preferably to be a doctor or a lawyer. They lived in a world where protecting your own was more important, and education was ok if it got you something concrete, like a good local job. Growing up, my cousins considered me a strange creature with no discernible skills and too many big words, but I was family and I was theirs. That acceptance was a big warm blanket when I was floundering at connecting with my own peers.

I went to an expensive small liberal arts school (SLAC) that drew the bulk of its students from the big cities/suburbs of the northeastern US. Not everyone was wealthy or had family resources. I knew kids who worked in the potato fields at home when they were not at school. I also knew kids whose parents didn't believe in education or didn't care to fill out the financial aid forms, and those kids worked off what they could and borrowed what they couldn't. The local strip clubs had a talent bonanza because of this. But the culture of the school was one of privilege, and the poor kids either kept quiet or left.

So I got into geology in college, and academically, it was the perfect fit. I could go outside and poke around in the dirt, and I could answer all sorts of interesting questions. Socially/emotionally, it was a bust. I wonder if part of the reason was because all the "cool kids" were all about backpacking and spending summers hiking (e.g. not toiling away in retail or some other crappy job you kept from high school) and having your own gear (all of it) and eating all organic this and that from whole paycheck whole foods. I was aware about the costs of the blithe earthy crunchy lifestyle, and extremely aware that other students didn't have the means to participate. See also this post about field course costs. This discomfort probably manifested as not having sufficient "team spirit".

In general, geologists (and other scientists/engineers in the environmental field) love to be outside. We pick up our love for the great outdoors from all sorts of places - from our family, from poking around a local woody patch, from organized activity like the Scouts. But how many geologists actually grew up out there, not using nature as a personal playground, but as the way you got your food or the wood to supplement/keep the house warm? I have a feeling the percentage is relatively low. If so, is that a problem? Well, if young geologists have been living in a social bubble, it can cause some real issues with perceived safety, community/resident communication, and effectiveness once they're out in the field.

grad school worth it?

Back when I was in grad school, I discussed the value of a masters' degree as an investment. Now I'm more than 5 years out from grad school. Was it worth taking 2 years out of my life? Did I recoup the salary I'd missed while I was living on a poverty-level TA/RA?

As I'd suggested in that old post, the value of a Masters degree isn't that easy to quantify.

I didn't get a big salary bump after I graduated. But I was able to find work in my field a couple months after I finished my thesis, right when the bottom had dropped out of the job market. I didn't use what I'd learned in grad school right away, either. I ended up working on some high-impact, high-visibility, ridiculously stressful projects that I hated, but which looked impressive on a résumé. I also got a PG.

I leveraged the PG + the experience + the degree into a job that pays better and that I enjoy, where I do get to be a technical expert and use the stuff I learned in grad school. I don't think I'd be here without the degree. At some point, the client expects the technical expert to have proof of education and certifications, and I have those now.

And on a personal note, I had an awesome experience in grad school. I was surrounded by smart, super-motivated, interesting people of all ages from all over the world. I developed a close-knit group of friends and we had a blast together. I had grown so much since college, and I was able to really take advantage of all the opportunities available at a major research university.

So would I recommend grad school for other environmental consultants?

It depends on so many factors: is there a need (in your firm or elsewhere) for the subject you'd want to study in more depth? Can you wrangle financial support to go? Can you get into a program that is well respected in your chosen field and/or in the region you plan to work in? If you're going to work through school, how long will it take, and are you sure you'll be able to complete it? Grad school isn't usually an automatic ticket to the next step in environmental consulting, so even though it worked for me, it may not work for everyone.

academics to consulting

A while ago, an academic ecologist posted an interview with an environmental consultant here. As a former grad student and as someone who has occasionally worked with academics as a consultant, I'm always interested in how the environmental biz looks to folks who have lots of experience in academia.

The consultant mentions a few cultural differences that I'd agree with:

1. The need to account for your time: you may have flexibility in your hours to a certain degree, but you also need to have a certain number of billable hours, and be able to justify those billable hours to project managers (and ultimately, to clients).

2. The level and direction of scientific inquiry is ultimately determined by regulatory requirements rather than scientific questions. I struggle with this at times. Although it would be nice to design a side study to figure out why, exactly, the contaminants are behaving a particular way at a site, I need to tie my evaluation to the ultimate disposition of the site. Are we collecting data that we will actually need in the future?

3. Reports and other deliverables (maps, etc.) are targeted to a much wider audience. You can't assume that the client or other stakeholders (local environmental groups/politicians/residents) will have a scientific background, so you need to make sure your arguments are well-reasoned and clear.

One culture isn't worse than the other; they just have different end goals. I do think that folks who transfer from industry to academia (and vice versa) will have a much easier time if they embrace those differences.

thesis field problems

I found an old post here regarding field difficulties during the course of a PhD. Although my grad school research was not as extensive or long-term (just a MS, not a PhD), I too had a field-based project that ended up changing mid-stream because of logistical problems.

First, the organization that was funding my research decided that what they really wanted was an evaluation of an entirely different material. So I tossed all of the papers I'd been collecting and started over. Then, once I'd developed a plan for the fieldwork and had finally figured out a million logistical problems for actually pulling it off, the field site epically flooded and I had to redesign everything. Then I had to cut the data collection short because of a large, single minded, chewing creature (probably a porcupine) which developed a taste for a particular, critical piece of infrastructure and returned every night, probably 30 seconds after it heard me leaving. Rodenticide was not an option.

If I'd been going for a PhD, I would have had more time to straighten out all those problems and collect more data. Or maybe I would have started with something even more complicated and encountered a whole new batch of issues. I can laugh about my star-crossed project now, but my mid-grad school doldrums had me convinced I was never going to get the damn thesis off the ground.

field course requirements

My previous posts (here and here) discussed geology field studies course costs and alternatives, respectively. But all this discussion of field courses started me thinking: are field study courses still required, and should they be?

When I was poking around the internet, I looked at my undergrad and graduate field study requirements. My old undergraduate program doesn't appear to have a field study course requirement (which was definitely in place when I was there), although the website is not totally clear. The undergrad program at my grad school has multiple geology tracks, each of which requires at least one field method course.

As I mentioned a few months ago, I'm a strong believer in having students move beyond the textbooks and developing their own interpretations, whether it's by examining rock samples in a laboratory or trying to determine why the local landscape looks the way it does. Most geology courses have this to some degree. So is a specific field method course still needed?

I think it is. A good geology field study course will not only involve using standard equipment to do basic geologic fieldwork, but will also show how to present the data in a standard format. How do you fill out a logbook? What information do you need to show, and how much detail do you need to go into for each entry? How do you collect, import, and use coordinates from your GPS, and what are some of the common pitfalls in using and evaluating spatial data?

There are very few branches of geology which are not based on field data. And if you're going to evaluate that data, you need to understand some of the circumstances under which it was collected or at least be able to critically evaluate how reliable it actually is.

geo field course options

In my previous post, I mentioned that I couldn't afford the fancier field study course offered by my college.

I did take care of my field study course requirement with a traditional course that involved a lot of primitive camping and bouncing across the landscape in woefully not-offroad-ready 15-passenger vans. In our case, we were using reserved college vans we'd driven out west. We spent most of the trip in arid, remote areas (likely because it's much easier for students to map geology where the land isn't buried under vegetation and "no trespassing" signs).

I did some poking around the internet, and there are a bunch of geology field study courses available for students who aren't able to attend their school's own courses. For example, course listings are available here, here, and here. The 4 to 6 week summer course appears to be standard, and although courses are available in more exotic areas (islands of Greece! Antarctica! New Zealand!), the cheaper ones will be the ones you can at least road-trip to.

Prerequisites and course rigor (both physical and intellectual) will vary widely. For my field course, the students were pretty much universally out of shape compared to the professors, who appeared to spend their free time running up and down mountains. So we did a lot of huffing and puffing after them. The expected timeframe for doing the courses will also vary by school. I did my field study course the summer after my freshman year - it had no hard prerequisites other than an intro geology course. Other field courses may have a long list of prerequisites or a focus on a particular area, such as geophysical or environmental sampling techniques.

So the final question is, do you need a field study course at all? That's for the next installment...

field course costs

One of my undergraduate course requirements was a field study course. The department had a traditional 6-week course in the summer every other year, but it also had a 3-week course in Europe that was quite a bit more expensive.

I did the 6-week course, which had a reasonable "course fee" (I recall it being around $300) and allowed us to stay (camp) in our dorm rooms for the first week. After that, the lodging ranged from dirt-cheap hotels to campgrounds with some degree of amenities to camping in the middle of nowhere. My school didn't charge tuition by the credit, so it didn't cost me anything more than that (plus food/laundry costs, which I'd need to pay for anyway).

I was initially curious about the European short course, which was paired with a normal-term half-credit course to make up a full credit. But the course was offered by the time I'd gotten cynical about the department, and I wasn't sure I wanted to go. The kicker, though, was that there was no way for me to afford it. There was some vague hand-waving about "additional financial aid", which I didn't think I would qualify for, and which sounded it was only for dire financial necessity. They also wanted commitments early in the process (like, a week after the initial informational meeting).

I was not an unusually (or even usually) disadvantaged student. I graduated with minimal debt that I paid off almost immediately. I hadn't really had my educational plans stymied by money before. But it made me think - if I skipped a field study course because of not just financial constraints, but because the people in charge blithely assumed that cost wasn't a factor, how many other people self-selected out of other field courses because of cost?

As I was writing this post, I got all fired up about field study course issues. So this week will be The Week of Field Studies. Stay tuned!

rude presentation questions

FSP has a recent post about being attacked when/after giving a presentation. The post has a poll which shows that the majority of respondents have indeed experienced a public rude comment/question during or after a talk. A rude question would be one that attacks the speaker and his/her research personally or is clearly intended as a "gotcha" question.

I think geologists are pretty laid-back in general. In my experience, folks tend to ask more pointed/technical questions of a speaker who seems to know what they're talking about. Undergrads and the clearly nervous tend to get a pass. However, the questions can get more pointed if someone is representing a company (say, a remediation firm) and the presentation sounds more like a sales pitch. For example, they have some new wonder-formulation that will work in all types of geology and has no field implementation issues at all.

I did have one person who had published several papers in my corner of the environmental field and seemed to take my research personally, and he was pretty aggressive when I was giving talks. He didn't like my scope of research and timeframe, and he would point this out every chance he got. I responded that financial and time constraints (there's only so much a master's student can do with a fieldwork-based project!) prevented me from designing a gold-plated research study, but that initial results were promising. And yes, I was aware of his work. And I was not actually doing what he did, I was looking at his subject from a different angle, using distinctly different methods.

After the second go-round, I was rather practiced at this.

I don't think I've actually been at a presentation where someone was attacked personally or told that their science was a waste of money. I'd like to think that if that were to happen, the audience would give a collective shrug and ignore the question to discuss the actual science.

MOOCs and geology

Janet Stemwedel has a new post up regarding the use of massive open online courses (MOOCs) in (replacing) university classes. Would MOOCs work for teaching geology?

I doubt it.

Geology is an applied science of observation, of going outside and looking at stuff (rocks, soil), and trying to piece together what happened. Often, you need to use most of your senses (ok, don't try tasting stuff in the environmental biz). Taped lectures will have examples of what to look for, but you really need to be given a bunch of samples or to go out and ponder road cuts and learn how to figure things out on your own. Is that a natural fracture, or did someone manhandle the sample? Which direction is "up"? How did those rocks get smushed together like that? How can I get a reliable indicator of fracture orientation in this mess? Being a good geologist is only partly about learning facts, and is more about developing an eye for important observations.

And being a successful environmental consultant is about more than just knowing your facts. It's about being able to use different lines of evidence to determine what's going on out there, and to evaluate other folk's theories. It's about writing reports that don't actively piss off the target audience. I've harped on this before, but the critical evaluation and writing skills I got from my small liberal arts college (SLAC) were what allowed me to progress quickly from where I started as a field tech. And my expensive, labor-intensive SLAC must have done something right according to my management, because my office hired a succession of new grads from that same program for years after I paved the way.

If I had no ability to access good teachers and relevant samples, then a MOOC would help to get some of the basic science down. So would a good textbook. But I'd have a serious deficiency in my understanding of geology if I didn't have someone to call attention to my bad habits and show me where my interpretations were going astray.

Hi, I'm a student

 FSP has a recent post here regarding students introducing themselves when they start presentations. She dislikes them. And so does most of the commentariat.

This is a little strange to me. When I was in grad school, I gave a bunch of presentations, and I really couldn't tell you if I started out by saying, "Hi, I'm Short Geologist, a student at X". I probably did. Not because I was angling for a job (that's what the conference networking is for) or because I was hoping to that the audience would go easy on me (hey, this presentation got accepted, and I've got interesting things to discuss! What's to be afraid of?) but because that's how I generally introduced myself at conferences.

I don't really see what a big deal it is. If you're not formally introduced, it makes sense to give the audience some context as to where you're coming from. Are you from a think tank? A federal agency? Academia? Industry? And besides, part of the point of the presentation is to publicize whatever institution is supporting your awesome research (even if it's just the institution that's paying your salary).

I agree that it would be a little strange to go into the nitty-gritty ("I've been working on my thesis for two years now, and I'd really like to wrap things up and be paid an actual salary"), but a one-sentence introduction that mentions you're a student seems completely reasonable.

conference tips

Ask a manager has a recent post requesting tips for young professionals attending their first conferences, and the post has a long list of good suggestions.

I've gone to a bunch of conferences in grad school and for work. A few of my suggestions (most of which were already covered):

1. Have a sweater or other warm cover-up such as a suit blazer, and make sure you have a respectable enough underlayer that you're comfortable taking the outer layer off. Expect the temperature control to be all over the place.
2. Comfortable shoes!
3. If you're going with other coworkers/students, divide up the sessions in advance so that you get more out of the conference as a group. The "in advance" bit is important because otherwise you'll spend all the time between sessions brainstorming who's going where.
4. If you're going in a big group, try to split up so that you don't default to hanging out only with the folks you already know.
5. If you don't know anybody at the conference, remember that you can always buttonhole the folks who have given presentations you've seen - you already have at least one topic to discuss.
6. Have a handy, easily-reachable place for business cards you receive, and one for your own business cards. Keep these separate, so you don't have to shuffle through other folks' cards to find some of your own.
7. I always try to wear shirts/tops with either pockets, buttons, or something else that I can clip my nametag on without having to stick it next to my neck or down by my hip.
8. I like to bring a thin bag that's big enough for my personal stuff and has some sort of dividers so that I can keep my conference swag and my notes separate, such as a small laptop bag.
9. Don't be afraid to ask questions! Presenters, organizers, and vendors are all happy to chat.

I always enjoy conferences - you get to meet a bunch of folks who are doing similar things or are at a similar stage in their career, but who live all over the country. And if you're lucky, you may find the perfect research method/product/client/employer while you're waiting in line.