Does anyone learn something at PITTCON?

[Steve]

Is there any value to go to PITTCON or is it becoming just a gathering place for people?

[Mark]

Steve,
In my humble opinion, I think PttCon is useful. It has always been a "gethering place for people" it that I always meet people from former jobs, I get to meet people with similar jobs and we trade experience, and get to meet some new people also. One of the big things I look frward to is the various poster sessions. I think that these are extremely informative expecially since the authors of the posters are generally right there to talk to.

There is not much better of an opportunity to see everything when you are shopping for new instrumentation, everyone who makes one of whatever you are looking for has it there at the show. I mean, where ekse can you run back and forth between vendors and say "Well so-and-so just told me this is an important feature on the instrument" or that his do can such-and such can yours? I recently bought a new GC-MS this way and am convinced this was well worth my time.

The talks, again my humble opinion, are getting to be a bit too much like a commercial, not nearly as much new content as they used to be, but again if you are shopping for a new column for a new analyssi or have a new detector need you can hear some of the latest technology there is. Of course you do have to filter out the guty who says that his newest is "just about to be released" which generally translates into "We are not sure just when we will get this thing to work".

Overall, I think there is still value in going to PittCOn, although I believe I am going to start going every other year as opposed to every year, things don't seem to be changing as fast as they used to and keeping updated every other year appears to be about right.

Regards and Happy Holidays,
Mark

[Bill Tindall]

Absolutely! I will be teaching a most useful course on buffers Thursday AM. (or at least I will if at least 10 people sign up. so do your part..............)

No doubt there are other useful courses earlier in the week too.

[Benjamin]

Friends,

I feel the question is good and deserves a variety of points of view. I worked for many years at the Analytical Labs of the largest chemical company in the world, and I was in charge of making recommendations about meetings, training, technologies, etc.

The overall opinion about this conference (at my former place of work) is that is not as useful as you may think. It is much too commercial and the technical information is not as good as that presented in other meetings (HPLC meetings, Intl Symposium on Chromatography (Europe), Capillary Chromatography (Riva del garda), etc).

If your interests cover a wide range of techniques and applications, or if you are very much into learning about new instrumentation (that may or may not be ready for commercialization), or if you want to take a short course (better taken in-house), then Pittcon is a good place to be. if you want to learn the latest in applications, technologies, and be in contact with the experts, then you will do better at more specialized meetings.

We always discouraged people from going to PittCon, but there were always a few guys that insisted on going. personally I always felt that the best Separations meeting was the European Intl. Symposium on Chromatography.

Good Luck to you all.

Benjamin

[tom jupille]

Different meetings for different purposes.

PittCon is actually a trade show with a meeting attached.

If you're not an expert, then it's a great meeting, because the short courses and vendor seminars are geared toward generalist users . If you're already an expert in chromatography, you will probably not learn anything new, but you will be able to evaluate the relative merits of available instrumentation. For many instrument companies, it's the one time they let the engineers and developers out of the back room to actually talk to users (to make my biases clear, I've spent pretty much my entire industrial career working for instrument and column companies, so I've always gone to Pittcon as an exhibitor).

I agree with Benjamin that the cutting edge developments tend to be presented at the smaller, more focused meetings. However, if you are not an expert (or don't happen to work at a company where you have access to experts who can invent techniques like GPC or Ion Chromatography ) then they can be a bit overwhelming.

[Kostas Petritis]

I think that PITTCON was much more informative before the companies started to make very detailed web sites about their (new) products, technologies etc. Right now it seems to be much easier to have the information you seek.

I will agree with the others that it is maybe too commercial and I also prefer more research oriented conferences. Personally I try to go every year at HPLC and ASMS conferences (the latter would be of marginal interest for pure chromatographers except if the use heavily mass spectrometry).

In addition to the communications presented I really enjoy that it is a "gathering of people", and I always have the opportunity to meet some new people and see how my old contacts are doing. I had also the opportunity to meet some of the people of this forum (they never look the way you imagine them .

[tom jupille]

Kostas' comment about the web cutting into attendance is holding true. Attendance was certainly down (as of the end of the day Wednesday, there were about 9,700 conferees and 10,800 exhbitors. The ratio isn't unusual, but the total is down from a high of around 34,000 a decade ago. This is the first time I've attended as a conferee rather than an exhibitor, and it was a whole different experience.

There is, of course, more to life than just chromatography: 1100 or so companies exhibiting, 130 or so of them focused on chromatography. I do chromatography for a living, so this is a useful reminder that most people use a variety of techniques.

I didn't see anything to challenge my earlier comment that PittCon is less a scientific meeting than a trade show. The scientific program was, as usual, heavily laden with "informercials". This isn't a criticism; given a venue which is only 10-15% chromatography, you have to assume that the average attendee is a generalist rather than a chromatographer, and present the material accordingly. One presenter of several posters said that he had gotten the greatest number of reprint requests from the most basic of his presentations (which consisted mainly of advice to novice chromatographers).

I'll defer to the people at LC-GC and American Lab, both of whom do thorough write-ups on new stuff in the month or so after PittCon. My project for the plane ride home is to update my database of company web sites. I'll post in on the Water Cooler board when I get home.

[Ron]

I have gone to many Pittcons, and I have seen an evolution of the meeting over the years. First of all, my understanding is that Pittcon was started as a meeting focused on the instruments, and was not ever focused as much on theory and "hard" science the way an ACS meeting is, for example. There are alway good technical papers at Pittcon, but there is also a tremendous number of marketing presentations. The exhibitors pay a higher percentage of the show costs than at any other conference I am aware of, and they are allowed to have a greater role in the technical program than at other conferences.

Even though a large number of papers are presented by the vendors, this does not mean that there is no technical merit in the presentation. I have presented a large number of papers at Pittcon as an exhibitor, and I always tried to make sure that there was good, sound technical background to everything I said. The goal was obviously to sell equipment, but that was done by offering good solutions to problems. Not all companies take that approach, whidh I consider to be a huge mistake.

The basic thing to do is to decide what your needs really are. If you want a lot of theory and basic research Pittcon is probably not where you want to go. If you are interested in highly speciallized equipment or techniques, then you probably should go to a specialty show. If you want to see the latest instruments for a variety of analytical methods, Pittcon is ideal.

I mentioned that I have seen an evolution at Pittcon over the years I have been attendiing. 15 to 20 years ago the major companies hired models to stand in the booths and attract attention, in much the same way companies do today at auto shows. Everything was geared around the exhibit hall, and there was almost a sideshow atmosphere at times. Things changed so that the personnel in the booths are almost all company employees, and the technical information was easier to get. The last few Pittcons I have been to have had more of an acedemic and theoretical orientation in some of the technical sessions. The exhibition is still the main attraction and the vendors still pay most of the bills, which is why the admission is so cheap compared to many of the other shows, but there seems to be more of an emphasis on the more basic research in the past few years.