Diary of the EAGE Conference in Paris

I travelled from London to Paris for the EAGE conference in mid June. It was Ramadan time so I did not fast since I was travelling hehe. Here, I would like to share a short summary that I wrote about the 3-day conference. As a student, this was my first real geologist conference and it was really interesting. This may give other students an idea of what to expect in their future conferences. 


Day 1: Tuesday, 13 June

                On the first day of the conference, I attended the student short course on ‘Integrating concepts for source rock deposition’ in the morning. Something I enjoyed about this session was that they explained the concepts in a manner that was easy to understand. The background of the topic was clearly explained and the presentation flowed smoothly. One of my favourite speakers during this short course presented with enthusiasm and had a clear presentation as he projected his voice well. He used a pointer which was helpful and he was very expressive and interactive with the audience. The speaker maintained good eye contact with most of the audience. He did not use a microphone but was able to speak loud and clear. In addition, his presentation had excellent visual aids, mind maps, good colours and interesting diagrams with a good level of detail. I was very attentive during this presentation. Some learnings I obtained during the other sessions within the student short course was to be careful with the microphone. One of the speakers was consistently hitting against the microphone by mistake and this created a loud noise multiple times interrupting the presentation. Some presentations had blurry images and the wordings and explanations on the diagrams are smaller than the citation font. This was inconvenient as the citation font was usually smaller and less important. One of the slides even had a bright yellow ‘highlighter’ colour as the background and this was very glaring to the eye and the wordings were in white which made it even harder to see.

                In the afternoon, I was ready for the first oral presentation which was highly important for my 3000-word essay but unfortunately, they announced a power outage and everyone had to evacuate the conference main building. I decided to go to the exhibition building and waited for them to provide us with a hopefully positive update. During this time, I sat for a presentation by the Kuwait Oil Company. There were three speakers and all had different presentation skills. The presentations on power point were very professional with good font style, font size and a nice layout. However, some slides had too much text or long sentences and a lack of visual aids. There were also some incorrect capitalisation and spelling errors. One of the speakers only made eye contact with one of the audience and spoke in a very monotonous manner. After this, there was an announcement made that all presentations in the conference building were cancelled for the day and was postponed the next day. The power outage was still not resolved. They later informed us that the presentations would take place on Wednesday, 14 June during lunchtime and after 5 pm. They would be shorter and free lunch would be provided the next day which was greatJ I also used the remaining time to participate in the student challenge where I met a new friend and we both went from booth to booth completing each of the 6 challenges. Upon completion, I was eligible for a lucky draw for a free trip to EAGE Copenhagen 2018!

Day 2: Tuesday, 14 June

I went to the most number of presentations today. Unfortunately, the speakers from the day before whose presentation I wanted to attend did not turn up at lunchtime or after 5 pm and apparently gave no news. In the morning, I attended the EOR 1 session until 1030am and then switched to the Shale Geology session until noon. During these talks, there were a few key points that I learned. One of the speakers was very hard to understand due to his accent but his slides helped a lot and were very clear. My favourite talk that day was on ‘Sedimentology of Black Shale in Turbidite at Semanggol Formation’ by a final year undergraduate student at University Teknologi Petronas, Malaysia. She spoke with great enthusiasm, at a good pace and she used pointers. She was very interactive with the audience and the most important thing was that she explained the introduction very well and went through her slides with a smooth flow. The diagrams on the slides were large and clear with some explanatory text which was visible. Her enthusiasm for the research topic was certainly reflected in her presentation. I was very impressed as she was a student presenting at the EAGE conference which was amazing indeed. She did receive some challenging questions afterwards, some of which she was not certain but she dealt with the questions fairly well.

After lunch, I attended an IOR-EOR dedicated session. Something I liked about the presentations was that the speaker was enthusiastic and had interactive slides with large figures and a clear introduction. One of the presentations was slightly dull. It was only in black and white with text only. There were no supporting diagrams and the speaker was speaking in a tone that was fading away at the end of every sentence. It was slightly hard to stay focused during this particular presentation. I then went for a lucky draw in the Exhibition Centre and returned for the ePoster 4 presentations. The poster had incredibly a lot of bulk text and complex equations which I thought were unnecessary. However, it could be that the content was too complex for me to understand but other professionals may have understood it well. The speaker made no attempt to project his voice or make eye contact with the audience. He was even standing sideways facing the wall to the right from where I was sitting so that the audience only had a side view of him. His poster did look neat, professional and clearly labelled but overall I think there was room for improvement in terms of presentation skills.

Day 3: Tuesday, 15 June

                On the last day of the conference, I attended the oral presentation on EOR 2 in the morning. I stayed for three presentations until noon. In the first one on Injection-falloff test, the speaker presented well with good intonation and explains every aspect of the research well with good reasoning. The speaker also addresses the uncertainties clearly which helps me understand the nature of the research and the limitations better. Overall the presentation was interesting but there were several aspects that could be improved. The slides were really plain with only black and white text and background, very long and complex equations were included, many graphs have no title and figure legend, the font used was very small at times and not visible and there were diagrams with no labelling. I would have thought at least a title on the slides with diagrams or a short text box would allow me to easily follow the presentation. The second one was on ‘screening of EOR chemicals’ and again there was a lot of bulk text but this time there was a lot of interesting graphic and animation related to the original research work. This was something different that I have not seen in the previous presentations and definitely captivating. The speaker was enthusiastic and explained his work clearly to the audience. When the speaker was done with the presentation and started opening to questions, there was an old person that stood up and commented directly that micro models are wrong. The speaker was taken aback as most of his presentation was focused on the micro model work that he did. The person added that there are many reasons why it was proven wrong in the 1960s and pointed to a literature paper that the speaker could refer to. The speaker dealt with the comment well and in my opinion, it could be an area that the speaker could improve to address this uncertainty. From my point of view, the speaker was either not aware of it or did not want to address this uncertainty openly to the audience as he did not comment much on it and simply thanked the person who made the comment. In the last presentation that morning during the Q&A session, the same person stood up to make a comment again saying that an aspect of her research was wrong. The chairman and many people in the room were obviously smiling but the person who made the comment gave a strong reasoning as to why he thought it was wrong and suggested a paper that could help the speaker. He seemed to have worked in both these areas from his PhD up to now.

                After the lunch break, I attended the ePoster 4 session. In my opinion, the poster session was very complex, specific and difficult for me to understand everything discussed. Graphs had no title, it was very wordy and the speaker spoke very softly in a monotonous tone.  Since I found the oral presentations to be more beneficial for me, I went to the session on ‘source rocks and petroleum systems’ directly after the student challenge lucky draw and another lucky draw to win a 1TB external hard drive. I did not get lucky in both but it was worth the try. The last two presentations I attended were fairly interesting and the last one related to the North Sea was commented by one of the audience to be a highly ranked abstract.