It has been 4 or 5 years since I have given a talk at a national ACS meeting. It was with great enthusiasm then that I registered and submitted my abstract last fall. There is not a lot we industrial guys can get up and talk about. A few weeks ago I confidently decided to follow up on the disposition of my talk and was dismayed to learn that it was declined.
D’oh!!!
I am very disappointed. To my knowledge I followed all of the rules and chose a section that fit the topic. While the ACS registration website does a good job of collecting your information, it is rather lacking in providing a means of feedback or status to speakers.
Since I have not yet been contacted by a human being, or an automated notification for that matter, I can only surmise that the theme of the section was a mismatch with my topic. Oh yes, I received a limp email “sorry” from somebody at the online help desk.
I wanted to talk about the unexpected energetic decomposition of a class of compounds and some DSC and TGA studies I have done.
Okay, I’m dismayed with certain organs of the Nat’l ACS and their inscrutable ways. But I am willing to admit that I missed some cue or other stagegate that kept me off the boat. But for cryin’ out loud! What was it?? Whose shoes do you have to shine to get an answer?
So, I’ll use the time to get more data and aim for the Boston meeting. A friend was helping with some Hartree-Fock calculations. I was able to correlate onset temperatures with certain periodic trends experimentally. Perhaps we’ll have a better theoretical understanding of the bonding issues by the next meeting.
Update. Made contact with a person. The sections website is a bit lacking in detail, but with persistant surfing names and email addresses can be found elsewhere.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
you could contact the symposium organizer to ask for some feedback
I’m working on that. Evidently they are busy.
Back when JACS was the Grey Lady one could put red crayon to butcher paper and successfully submit something clever. That evolved into the Journal of Stupid DNA Tricks, and now the Miltimedia Closed Shop. We suffer a glut of the untenured in an era of vicious budget contractions and ineducable matriculants (diversity!). Everybody must publish weekly, reducing research to lying business plans, PERT charts, and press releases. “PROJECTED 0.1% YIELD INCREASE CONVERTS GRASS TO BIODIESEL!”
You had something useful to say, something that could save infrastructure. (Lives have no tax write-down for depreciation, no spreadsheet assessment of DCF-ROI.) Your slot was equal opportunistically awarded to an elegant mediocrity, possibly an ACS Project SEED that sprouted to ragweed. Official Truth requires sacrifice.
Brilliantly put. I like it.
I know what you mean about sometimes not being able to talk about things. When you are on the burgeoning edge of research, it often happens that you can’t talk about what you had done. Incidently, I was out looking for process chemistry blogs and your website came up. I just thought I would drop by to say Hi from a fellow process chemist.
Brian
pharmnbiofuel.wordpress.com (a little shameless promotion)
Hey man, thanks. I’ll make sure to pay a visit. R&D has a bit of a Cosa Nostra structure to it. Being in industry puts one in a bit of an outsider position.
It’s a difficult situation when you want to present to potential employers as well. I have drawn ovals in the past to hide certain functional groups. It makes the presentation look like a first-grader did it. Actually, that might make a genius whitepage. How to protect your company’s IP and still give a meaningful talk. No one has done something like that before. If it was done well, it could be an industry standard whitepage. Always coming up with brilliant ideas.
Brian (that Pharmnbiofuel guy)