Embracing Academic Conferencing

When you present at an academic conference, scope out your room before your session starts.

Many of you have likely attended an academic conference during your graduate program, and several of you are probably planning on presenting at one in the near future.  Conferences are of course major components of academic life but also common in research and/or knowledge-based fields.  The unstoppable conference phenomenon naturally gives rise to plenty of guidelines for presenters and speculations on past, present, and future uses for conferences.  For a recent overview of such concerns, see this short but informative 2013 article that ran in The Guardian.  Conference etiquette, or seeming lack of it, is another topic of interest to conference goers, as noted in this 2015 piece that appeared in Chronicle Vitae featuring an interview with Anna Post, the great-great-granddaughter of famed etiquette guru Emily Post.

In contrast to such general-interest articles, this post offers some conferencing food for thought specifically targeted to you, the NIU thesis or dissertation writer.  Photos and most anecdotes come from my experiences this past week presenting and attending the 54th Allerton English Articulation Conference in Monticello, Illinois.

Traveling

In addition to obvious preparation musts such as practicing your planned speech (at least three times) and identifying sessions to attend before and after you present, double-check your travel arrangements with the goal of arriving at the venue at least an hour earlier than registration time.

Ordered rows in the gardens at Allerton.
Beware: routes to conference sites may not be so orderly.

Commonsense advice, yes, but nevertheless worth repeating.  You may have fairly clear directions, but expect to run into complications during the actual journey and plan accordingly.  Case in point: the drive down to the venue in Monticello (not my first trip there—I also presented at Allerton four years ago) took longer than planned because I got lost.  My memories of the route off the interstate were fuzzy, my printed directions turned out to be slightly out of date, and access to directions via phone or GPS device is wonky in this rural area.  A related anecdote: last April I presented at a conference in San Diego.  Accomplishing the first trolley ride from hotel to venue there also took a bit longer than expected.  Once on the scene I found myself relearning how waiting to cross busy streets can add minutes to your walking time and that trolleys don’t always arrive or depart exactly when scheduled.

Surveying

The small but adequate Butternut Room at Allerton.
Room size naturally affects your speaking approach. 

After registering and donning your name tag, wander and mingle but also check out the room you’ll be presenting in.  A common bit of advice is to test equipment you may need such as computer, OHP, screen, or microphone.  The earlier you can do this, the better.  Ideally, you should visit your room well in advance of your session so that you can also get a feel for its size and layout in relation to your talk.  A large space naturally requires a different speaking approach than a small one does.  If you can scope out the room while it’s empty, stand at the front or at the lectern.  Practice parts of your presentation.  If chairs or tables are movable (and if your session is the next one), consider ways you can rearrange the speaking and/or audience areas to suit your needs but especially those of your expected attendees.  Also consider lighting.  Depending on the sun’s position during the time of your session, window shades might need to be adjusted.  Before the presentation at Allerton this past week, my speaking partner and I went through all these steps.  As a result, our presentation ran smoothly and featured engaged participation from attendees.

Presenting 

Food line at Allerton.

Surely you’ve heard plenty about practical approaches to delivering a presentation.  Let me add a reminder that your planned speech, though very important, is still a minuscule moment within the overall time you’ll spend sharing your ideas at a conference.  Before and after your session and during other sessions, you’ll have numerous chances to speak with others about your work.  At Allerton, I met and chatted with several attendees during lunch; I met and conversed with several others between various sessions, during walks in the gardens, and over dinner.  In so doing, I naturally discussed aspects of my joint presentation but also my dissertation, teaching, and career plans.  Remembering that presenting at a conference means more than just speaking formally for a short time can actually help you when it’s your time to stand and deliver.  Share main ideas in your planned speech.  Expect to elaborate on these and other ideas during Q & A and during other interactions throughout the event.
     
Reflecting

How did the presentation go?  Were the follow-up discussions and later sessions constructive and helpful?  Was it all worth it?  You’ll have various answers to these questions immediately after your session and as the conference moves to a close.  But you can expect a different set of answers in the days and months that follow.  These later reflections will be most useful to you in the long run.  Expect to reevaluate your studies, your stance on issues important in your field, and your ongoing thesis or dissertation project during and after your next academic conference.  If you can, spend some time outside the venue during and after the event to foster these healthy reflections and to add to the overall experience.  Allerton is especially rewarding in this regard.  But no matter where your conference is held, there is always much to explore within but also beyond the center.

Path to the Walled Garden at Allerton.
Heed your long-view reflections after an academic conference.

The Graduate Degree: A Prelude to Knowledge Work

Investigating, analyzing, evaluating, creating, contextualizing, self-directing: skills like these are integral to the writing of a thesis or dissertation but also characteristic of the broad occupational domain called knowledge work.  To thesis and dissertation writers at any stage of their projects, below we offer thoughts on how you’re already developing—and can continue to develop—skills that are crucial for success in knowledge-oriented fields.

Tallies and Time Clocks?

Knowledge work is generally hard to quantify or measure.  Ironically, though, those who engage in such work across fields of academia tend to be fairly obsessed with counting and measuring.  Most carefully keep or monitor totals of papers presented, articles published, grants awarded, committees served on, and classes taught per year.  When you arrange your CV and the several accompanying documents needed for an academic job search, your field’s particular obsessions with such performance-related numbers boldly reassert themselves.  Other academic endeavors are sometimes summed up in terms of hours spent per week in classrooms, offices, labs, meetings, field investigations, grading sessions, or writing stints.

Yet the efforts that go into various kinds of academic production are not always easy to break down into regular time chunks.  Realistically, much academic work can keep the worker occupied from early morning to late at night, during parts of weekends, and during stretches of semester breaks.  (Let me briefly add that plenty in and outside academia do seem interested in figuring out the number of hours per week academics actually work—or in debating how many hours per week they should work.  A couple of recent reports (see here and here) suggest that such investigations and debates are complex and sometimes testy.  We avoid these issues in this post.)

Your Project: Training in Key Knowledge-Work Skills

A lot of what you do while completing your thesis or dissertation is obviously solid preparation for a future career in knowledge-centered domains.  As outlined and nicely detailed by the Careers & Employment Division at the University of Manchester, those aiming for a career in academia need to develop at least five skills for success.  Good news: as soon as you embark on your project, you’re immersed in an experience that can help you hone each of them.

Networking: As you develop relationships with members of your committee, each member can introduce you to others to help build your professional network.  In addition, while researching and writing, you can further extend your network by attending and/or presenting parts of your project at conferences.  Last year around this time, I traveled to a national conference to present a paper based on research for one of my dissertation chapters and attended multiple panels in areas central and peripheral to my academic interests.  The experience led to new contacts and eventually a request to submit a piece to a scholarly society’s publication.  Next month, I’ll travel to a regional conference to deliver a presentation with an NIU colleague and attend several discussion sessions.  You’re likely taking advantage of similar networking opportunities.  If not, seek them out.

Time Management: You’re already a knowledge worker and thus already weighing priorities and setting many deadlines of your own.  In previous posts on this blog, we’ve covered approaches to managing time during writing sessions, balancing your project with family matters, and maintaining your focus and enthusiasm by mixing work with recreational activities.  Consider such scheduling practices as sound preparation for the self-directed knowledge work of your post-degree career.

Resilience: While writing a thesis or dissertation, setbacks inevitably occur.  Data may need to be reanalyzed.  Ideas and approaches may need revamping.  Feedback on your progress from committee members—or from attendees at academic conferences—can be encouraging but also humbling.  As you get closer to the project’s completion, you’ll likely start looking for your postgraduate job.  Academic job hunting is especially fraught with pressures, rejections, and disappointments.  But lows like these that you experience throughout your project build your patience and resilience for similar wrinkles you’ll face down the road.

Presentation Skills: As a knowledge worker, you need to be able to present ideas clearly, in a variety of settings, among colleagues but also among people unfamiliar with intricacies of your work.  Each time you revise a section of your long document, you add useful material to your expanding pool of well-articulated expressions of your findings.  And you shouldn’t just aim to present them at your defense—another reason to plan to present at conferences while completing your project.  If you’re teaching, consider ways to integrate insights from your developing work in the classroom.

Project Management: At the NIU Thesis Office, we stress the value of being proactive in managing your thesis or dissertation project.  In a previous post, we featured a review of a useful book that describes the project-management approach to the dissertation.  Ultimately, you’re the manager of your project—under supervision of your director, of course.  The management experiences you gain now will certainly inform many aspects of your future knowledge-oriented employment.

Final Thoughts

Happy investigating, analyzing, evaluating, self-directing, and writing to all.  And good luck to those of you defending over the next few weeks!