2026 MASA Conference Retrospective

yeah that's awesome I would say my high is more of a personal, getting to see everybody, just the sense of community that we have.

And it feels like such a friendly group that, you know, even the newcomers can wind up making a connection.

They feel like we've been friends for years and years, right? Um, and how those connections, even if it's like, Alex, I hadn't seen you in what, three years.

And it was just like, no time had passed.

And it was, it was wonderful.

Um, and how diverse it is.

And yes, I know their early career and mid career and late career and people in different roles and everything.

But when we get together, it's like that hierarchy.

It, we, we know it exists, but it's not.

felt, if that makes any sense.

And I love that.

I love that so very much.

My low was I had to leave a day early and jump right back into real life.

And if I could do anything differently, it would be to bracket off some time where I could take all those thoughts I had and get them written down, you know? I've tried to do this at other conferences where we make our last session sort of a get stuff on paper type session so that it doesn't evaporate before we leave.

And that's something that I would love to include at some point in the future, maybe.

And then my Buffalo, gosh, it was, Peter, it was our session, I think.

I mean, I know that we put our papers together and we crafted it as a panel, not as individual submissions, but just the way it lined up and came together was...

Even better than I could have anticipated.

It was so fun.

And everybody that was in the room, it was like, hey, Martin was talking about this earlier.

And Ben talked about this yesterday.

And we just were able to pull people that were in the room into the panel.

And it was so cool.

It was really, really fun.

That's what this is supposed to be.