One word: communication.

I was approached by the ISCB Student Council leadership almost a year ago with an invitation to work as the co-chair for SCS2016. Yesterday, students from around the globe came together to share their research in computational biology here in Orlando. Throughout the many month-long organizing process, one theme stayed constant: the importance of communication.

It’s communication that convinces senior faculty to travel and give keynote lectures. Communication that persuades pharmaceutical and publishing companies to sponsor travel fellowships and our networking event. Communication that gets the word out to students around the world, communication that enables us scientist to speak in a common language despite different backgrounds, educations, accents and opinions. And most importantly, communication that allows students in different time zones come together and work to put an event like SCS2016 together.

To this end, a few practical tips: Doodle polls with timezone support are key for organizing meetings with people from different parts of the world. Skype or other web-based group calls keep people together and on track. To-do lists and documents of people’s responsibilities prevent you from forgetting what was decided at the last meeting. Gentle reminders via email are sometimes needed to make sure deadlines are met.

I learned a lot about the way I work with people. I’m quick to take on additional responsibilities if I feel I can complete a task quicker than delegating it out to someone else. I had to learn that “fast” or “better” isn’t always the end goal. It can be much more rewarding to give the responsibility to someone else and let them learn from it.

Inevitably, communication will break down at some point in the process. At this time, responsibilities fall on the head organizers to complete what needs to be done, even if it involves losing sleep!

Organizing SCS2016 was a lot of work, especially in the few weeks before the conference. Was it worth it? Without a doubt. I’m grateful for the opportunity I had to learn and work with other motivated students, and I’m proud of the event we pulled off yesterday!

This post was originally posted in the PLOS Computational Biology Field Reports Blog.