A Very Gen X Post About MAPS

Imagine it’s late 1991. You’re sitting in the driver’s seat of your used Mazda RX-7 in the 7-Eleven parking lot, sucking on the straw of your Big Gulp filled with ice cold Orange Crush, which you bought to calm yourself down after you accidentally dropped your Queensrÿche Empire cassette on the ground and clumsily trod over it with your black British Knights high tops. Disaster!

Wiping an orange drop off your Bugle Boy jeans and adjusting the class ring you just picked up from Jostens, you snap on the car radio and rest your mulleted head back against the headrest as the opening strains of Temple of the Dog’s Hunger Strike begins to play.

Oh great, you mumble to yourself, just what we need, another pseudo-grunge Pearl Jam knockoff.

Then the lead singer makes his first appearance.

I don’t mind stealin’ bread..

Hold on a minute, you think. That sounds like Eddie Vedder.

From the mouths of decadents…

You straighten up in your seat a little. That is Eddie Vedder. What’s going on here? Is there a new Pearl Jam song out? And old unreleased song? Whatever it is, it’s pretty good. Your day just got a little bit better.

You keep listening, nodding along, making a note to next time ask Sheila at the Hair Cuttery to trim the top a little shorter so your gelled-up spikes don’t brush the roof of the RX-7. So annoying!

Then the chorus kicks in.

I’m going hungryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy…(going hungryyyyy-AYYYYYY)

Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait. No, that can’t be right. That sounds like Chris Cornell doing the echo, but that’s impossible.

You reach out and turn up the volume.

I’m going hungryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy…(going hungryyyyy-AYYYYYY)

I’m going hungryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy…(going hungryyyyy-AYYYYYYAYYAYY)

I’m going hungryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy…(going hungryyyyy-AYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY)

That is definitely Chris Cornell. You would recognize his voice anywhere, because if Pearl Jam is your favorite band, then Soundgarden is next on the list.

You keep listening, still a bit stunned, to Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell trading lead vocals for the rest of the song. It’s hard for you to believe that, unexpectedly, some of your favorite people are together in the same place.

Last week, I had the pleasure of joining two of my favorite colleagues, Karen Roy and Greselda Butler, for a presentation on Bridging the Gap: What Medical Affairs Can Learn from CME to Elevate External Education at the Medical Affairs Professional Society (MAPS) Annual Americas Meeting. It was my first time attending MAPS and, if I’m doing my math correctly, my first time presenting at a non-CME/CE conference. I’m pretty sure that’s accurate. At the very least, it’s been quite a while since I’ve done a presentation that was not primarily focused on a CME/CE audience.

I’ve been attending the Alliance conference for 25 years, and when I go, I see more familiar faces than unfamiliar faces. It’s basically a reunion of old friends and colleagues. Since this was my first time attending MAPS, I saw far fewer familiar faces…or so I expected.

One of the cool things for me at the conference was that I kept running into pockets of IME friends at different times and places: strolling down the conference hall; presenting at a workshop; grabbing lunch from the table stacked with extremely mediocre sandwiches; at the hotel lobby bar after the last session. Hey, is that Wendy at the podium? I think that’s John holding a glass of white wine. Shoot, Mike just took the last turkey wrap. Familiar faces in unexpected places. It was fun to unexpectedly find some of my favorite people together in the same place.

A unique trait of the CME/CE community is that it is just that—a community. We do the same work. We work in the same places. We go to the same meetings. We know the same people. We have our ups and downs. People come and people go. But we are a community and that’s something I truly appreciate.