One thing they don’t teach you in school is, what to do at a conference… Important work happens away from the auditorium: that’s the first lesson… And Huang, who cannot have been much older than I, was already talking about his responsibility for the direction people were taking in the field, for not leading people into barren areas because they were currently fashionable. That responsibility was breathtaking: here I was, all outfitted with my nifty doctorate and my office at the Experimental Station, and nobody had told me, “It’s time to stop thinking like a student.”