Who are all these people?

I walked into the lobby of the downtown Hilton in San Francisco and wondered if I had suddenly been transported to Vegas. It's been awhile since I've seen so many people and queues waiting to check in with a dozen front desk receptionists. Should I mention the screaming picketers outside of the front doors? Or how about the multitude of serious looking suits who were attending the Homeland Security training? Perhaps it was the fact that they not only give me a room number – but a tower number where I would find said room. There are maps everywhere with digital readouts of everything that is going on. Like in an airport.

I found my room without incident; went to a meeting over at the parent company and came back in time for an evening reception. I was suspicious when I saw that this was being held in the Grand Ballroom. Deciding to check out the food tables, I wandered up through the layers of escalators and elevators, registered for the conference and then popped in to the reception. Of course the room was filled with vendors – and more queues this time for free alcohol and soft drinks. Vendors – what kind of vendors come to a graduate school admissions conference? Lead generating companies; database management companies; publications where you can be listed – basically nothing useful to me.

I checked out the hors d'oeurves – endless fried wontons and other highly caloric tidbits – with little interest. It was a sea of voices – happy, social voices of the networking professional - and I wandered through them as a silent voyeur. I didn't feel bad about this but I certainly had no compelling reason to stay.

Tomorrow will give me a chance to listen and learn hopefully useful things that will help me continue to grow in this new profession of mine. And I'm curious what kind of questions these educators will raise. What conversations will be generated? I was out of the reception in under five minutes without a word spoken. I was a stranger in a strange land and to be honest – I think that is just fine. We'll see if this is a world that I want to be part of.