Confessions of a Postgrad Conference-Eater

18 April 2011

By Daria Izdebska

Ping. You’ve got mail. It’s the newest Call For Papers! Excited? You should be.

A conference, you think – an academic adventure, a gathering of mythical proportions where the brightest minds share the most precious gems of knowle… Wait, something’s not quite right.

Inevitably, you’ll come across the deadly sins of conferencing and commit them yourself, time and again. The deadline for sending abstracts is in… two days? Despite the initial panic, you think there must be something in your life’s worth of research that can fit in with the overall theme, as in: “Life and Love in Late Antiquity” or “Transgressions and Transformations”.  It’s broad enough, after all. And alliterative.

So, like an alchemist, you concoct an abstract, piecing together something vague, but strikingly original. You struggle with the title. The fashionable question marks, parentheses, dashes, used creatively and in abundance, loom over your head, but do you really want to use them?

Once your abstract gets accepted, you tend not to worry about the particulars. The conference is more than half a year away, so you’ll have months to perfect the paper, to give it structure and a proper punch, to smooth out the rough edges, perhaps even make it drily amusing. Honestly, months.

Unfortunately, far too many of us start their work a bit later than planned. Procrastination is the daily bread of academia and writing one’s paper a day before the conference, adding finishing touches on the train, or adjusting the powerpoint presentation five minutes before the session are not unheard of. It’s both comforting and worrying you’re not the only one, is it not? Makes you think about academic integrity.

A conference is an odd and exotic environment, as the individuals attending it come in all shapes and sizes: nervous postgrads delivering their first papers, seasoned professors launching an amusing lecture, an acerbic member of the audience mercilessly undermining your entire argument, or, worse, asking the most ridiculous questions to get their ‘screen-time’. You might even listen to the same paper twice, if you’re a regular. Or doze off during a dreadfully reiterative presentation.

There will be good papers, surely. Some may even be excellent, groundbreaking. The discussions might even genuinely help you see certain issues in a different light. With a bit of luck, someone may even ask you relevant questions and give good advice on improving your own research. But is this really what conferencing is about?

To me it’s much more about the networking. The coffee breaks. The banquet in the evening. And there’s nothing wrong with that; sometimes it might be the only way to start meaningful and lasting working relationships with other scholars in your field, especially if it's a relatively narrow one.

Of course, the stratagems of academia tell you to devote your time to writing the more highly-valued journal articles. It is a question of balance, and one worth asking, but the benefits of getting ‘out there’ are many and varied. You overcome a mental barrier, the fear of presenting in front of a more experienced audience. You get to see that some of those big names are actually pleasant people. But above all, you collect invaluable contacts that will later help you join research projects and joint publications, exchange sources, keep up to date with the newest discoveries, and… plan new conferences.

So when that next Call for Papers reaches you – are you going to go for it? Is it worth the hassle?