ANOTHER CONFERENCE

“No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.” – J. Robert Oppenheimer

What a long day today! I started out at 6:30 am and only got home at 10:30 pm. We are in the midst of an academic retreat in our Melbourne Campus and we have about 70 of our staff from all over the nation visiting and taking part in the activities. I was in charge of two sessions and had one presentation as well as the team-building activity to take care of. Everything went extremely well and all attendees are engaged and doing well in terms of networking, getting to know one another, expanding their knowledge base and generally participating. We have one more day tomorrow and then thankfully they all go home and I have the weekend to recover.

Part of the trouble has been that as well as having to participate in the retreat, my ordinary day to day activities have to be taken care of and some urgent matters require me to literally drop everything and deal with them. Still, it all went well and I was able to juggle with it all without dropping any balls.

For this evening’s activities, we went to dinner at Max’s Restaurant in Hardware Lane. There were forty of us attending and we all had a good time with some good food and wine and lots of animated conversation. We were the only patrons in the smaller of the two dining rooms and this was good in terms of being able to laugh and speak without worrying too much about upsetting other diners.

One of the good things about organising a successful event like this is that one’s efforts do not got o waste and that the money and resources one has expended in bringing it all together are justified and people feel as though they have spent valuable time wisely. This was certainly the case with this conference and I have had numerous attendees come to me to say ho much they are enjoying the conference.

conference |ˈkänf(ə)rəns| noun
1 A formal meeting for discussion: He gathered all the men around the table for a conference.
• A formal meeting that typically takes place over a number of days and involves people with a shared interest, esp. one held regularly by an association or organization: An international conference on the environment | The third annual National Wilderness Conference.
• [usu. as adj. ] A linking of several telephones or computers, so that each user may communicate with the others simultaneously : a conference call.
2 An association of sports teams that play each other.
3 The governing body of some Christian churches, esp. the Methodist Church.
verb [ intrans. ] [usu. as n. ] ( conferencing)
take part in a conference or conference call : video conferencing.
PHRASES
in conference in a meeting; engaged in discussions.
ORIGIN early 16th cent. (in the general sense [conversation, talk] ): from French conférence or medieval Latin conferentia, from Latin conferre ‘bring together’.