The Strange, The Odd, The Off-Beat

Posted May 11, 2001 Student Affairs Online, 2 (Spring)

As the spring semester comes to a close, the summer conference season begins to heat up. For all types of information about a national meeting's host city, there is no better place than the StudentAffairs.com Conference Center.

The Conference Center provides a sizable number of links on a city's restaurants, night life, hotels, general travel information and, my favorite section, the off-beat. Our researchers scour cyberspace for the interesting and bizarre. For example...

In our Las Vegas listing--site of the American College Health Association Conference, May 29-June2--there is a URL for the complete wedding guide, Las Vegas style; and a glossary for understanding Las Vegasese.
Kansas City, the location for the June 17-19 ACUHO-I Annual Meeting, has links to The Gesundheit Institute (from the man who inspired the Robin Williams movie, Patch Adams); and the complete history of the Kansas City Fire Department!
Professionals attending the National Career Development Association Conference, meeting in Tucson, Arizona the end of June, can brush up on their history by reviewing 600,000,000 years of the city at a glance or read about one of the great summer traditions of the Tucson, sleeping outside.
Still, my current favorite is in Portland, Oregon, where the 24th annual Association on Higher Education and Disability National Conference will he held. There, attendees can visit The Museum of HP Calculators (I'm not joking). The Museum of HP Calculators displays and describes Hewlett-Packard calculators introduced from 1968-86, plus a few interesting later models.

These are just a few of the links in our Off-Beat section. Many more are included. Even if you aren't attending a particular national conference, browse through anyway. Also, information on more national conferences will be posted throughout the coming months. If we haven't yet included your upcoming association meeting in our Conference Center let us know. Our staff is waiting to uncover more oddities for your viewing pleasure.