A cautionary tale from our contributing editor, Daniela Witten:

During my first few years as faculty, I traveled far and wide to give invited talks at department seminars and conferences. At the beginning, the travel was fun, and helpful for my career as I built out my professional network. But as time passed, the marginal career benefit of each additional trip decreased: what I needed was not a bigger network, but more time in my office to think and meet with my PhD students and write papers. And more importantly, the trips stopped feeling fun: I was tired, and wanted to spend my time living my personal life in Seattle. It became a vicious cycle: because I wasn’t enjoying the travel, I wasn’t making the most of it professionally, which made me enjoy it even less.

To break out of this cycle, I learned to say “no” to the majority of invitations. I am now very selective about my work travel, and try to keep it to just a handful of trips per year, so that I can enjoy and benefit from the trips that I do take.

But every year, when I put together my work travel schedule, I budget time for JSM. Now I’m going to let you in on a little secret: JSM is not about the talks, especially post-pandemic, when there are countless opportunities to attend talks by many of those exact same speakers virtually via Zoom. Yes, of course you should attend the talks when you’re at JSM! But the real value-add of JSM is social. I go to JSM to meet up with grad school friends, distant collaborators, PhD alumni, the person with whom I have nothing in common research-wise but with whom I really hit it off at a conference in 2012, etc. And when I go to JSM, I go hard: I jam-pack my schedule with back-to-back social commitments from morning to night. Simply put: I act as though “socializing with statisticians” is a competitive sport, and JSM is the world championships.

But I really have no business being at the world championships: I have not trained for them. I spend 361 days per year only minimally socializing with statisticians outside of my immediate sphere, I’m an introvert, and I require at least seven hours of sleep per night to function as a human (and nine+ for optimal performance). And so every year, I start Day 1 of JSM with boundless enthusiasm; by Day 2 I’m in an over-caffeinated state of near-exhaustion; by Day 3 I can no longer remember how to answer normal human questions like “how are you doing”, “what have you been working on these days”, and “have you had lunch”; and by Day 4 I have a searing headache and am just three minutes of small talk away from becoming a menace to society. By the time I fly back to Seattle on the morning of Day 5, I swear that I will never again socialize with another statistician. And the cycle repeats.

So this year, after a lot of introspection, I decided to approach JSM differently, and to go a little less hard. By this I mean: I’d honor my inner introvert, and spend my mornings on “me” time, while spending afternoons and evenings fully participating in all that JSM has to offer. As part of that “me” time, I got enough sleep, and went for runs (alone!!!) in the beautiful city of Toronto, both through its parks and along its spectacular waterfront.

And so this year, on the morning of Day 2 of JSM I was bright-eyed and well-rested; on Day 3 I was fully able to answer basic questions that arise as part of normal human conversations; and on Day 4 I was blissfully headache-free, jogging past Sugar Beach while congratulating myself on the quality of my life choices, when suddenly — FOOSH!

For the uninitiated, FOOSH is the acronym used by medical professionals to describe a “fall on outstretched hand.” In this case, my FOOSH was caused by the retractable leash connecting the woman sitting on the bench to my left and her little yippie dog to my right. At eight inches off the ground, the leash made a perfect trip wire, and I didn’t even know it was there until I hit the concrete with my arms splayed out in front of me. After a moment spent taking mental inventory of each of my body parts in a preliminary assessment of damage, I picked myself up, gathered what little remained of my dignity in the midst of a crowd of concerned bystanders, and completed my run.

By the time I arrived back at my hotel room—my right arm jutting away from my body at an unnatural angle—I knew that my arm was broken. But, I had places to be and things to do: after all, my “me” time was over, and Day 4 of the JSM Olympics was about to begin! And so, I took a quick shower (hard to do with one arm completely immobilized), got dressed (even harder), and continued my day. I went straight from my hotel room to a luncheon that I was hosting, and then onto three separate meetings with collaborators, and then to the COPSS awards session to watch my grad school officemate win the Presidents’ Award (which you can read about here). It’s not that I didn’t know my arm was broken—I absolutely did. But, I had a schedule for JSM, and you can’t win at JSM by getting off schedule. At 6pm, I finally admitted defeat and hopped in an Uber to the emergency room, where I was diagnosed by X-ray with a radial head fracture (the canonical FOOSH injury), given a whole bunch of painkillers and a sling made out of cheesecloth (literal cheesecloth!), and sent on my way. I made it back to JSM just in time to finish celebrating Ryan’s accomplishments (see the photo).

When I got back to Seattle, I was telling a friend this story, and he asked me why I didn’t go to the ER earlier. I justified, “Well, I had a schedule! I had to host a lunch, and then I had to go to three meetings, and then I had to watch Ryan get his award, and—” My friend cut me off and asked me why I hadn’t thought that a broken arm might deserve priority over those plans. Honestly, I could not answer, because it had not even occurred to me. But now that my friend had said it out loud, it seemed absurd that I hadn’t thought of it. Yes, I had a list of tasks that I wanted to accomplish on Day 4 of JSM, but I was in enough pain that I really wasn’t effective at those tasks anyway—I certainly did not have meaningful research conversations three hours after breaking my arm! And yes, I wanted to win at the Statisticians’ Social Olympics—except that’s not a real thing, it’s 100% imaginary and I actually made it up, and I’m definitely not winning any sort of Olympics with a broken arm.

Well, it’s never too early to plan for JSM 2024 in Portland. I have already decided that I’ll continue my new tradition of spending my mornings on “me” time, and my afternoons and evenings participating in JSM. But, unlike at JSM 2023, I won’t participate too fully. It’s like the lesson I learned about work travel all those years ago: a little bit of fun is fun, but too much fun is not. I’ll put together a schedule, but it will include an opt-out clause for medical emergencies, natural disasters, and “just not feeling like it.” I probably won’t win, but I’m pretty sure it will be my best JSM yet.

2023 COPSS Presidents’ Award Recipient Ryan Tibshirani, Daniela Witten, and Cheesecloth. Daniela notes, “My arm is drooping out of the cheesecloth because it’s very hard to adjust a sling with only one working arm, and also, did I mention that the sling was made out of cheesecloth?”