The etiquette of conferences
Two posts at Dan Drezner and Kieran at Crooked Timber about conferences.
I am taking them to heart. This part in particular felt just like some of the conferences I’ve been to:
Attending an academic conference is like being a teenager again. This is why they can be so awful. You hang around trying to attach yourself to a group ? preferably the cool kids, but in the end any group will do ? and then these groups hang around waiting for something to happen.
Now the conferences I have attended have been mostly small ones. There are two or three groups. If there are two, they are faculty and graduate students, with some junior faculty (ie, got an academic position within the past 2 years) going with the graduate students. If there are three, there’s faculty, junior faculty, and graduate students. I’ve been lucky, mostly — one conference was huge but I went with a friend (just to listen), one was small and at Canada U while I was an undergrad there (also just to listen and go to the party). The ones I have been to since were somewhat different.
The first one I presented at, I was the *last talk*. This is bad. As my advisor warned me, no one except your friends will talk to you until after your talk. And they pretty much didn’t, except for some graduate students who were at the University of Canada.[1] But I spent the weekend being sick about my talk, and it was a dull place for a conference, so that was okay. And after the talk, I had one person first think I had just been finishing up my dissertation, then think he had offended me because I was really a faculty member, and then babble about how he could tell the difference between PhD student talks and MA student talks and mine was definitely PhD calibre how could I only be an undergrad . . . Some of this was bullshit, of course, but I was pleased. Then he insulted the city Dullness is in — indeed, the whole state — which my coauthor thought sort of rude, but after a year living there I understand.
The next one I presented at was the same conference, a year later. That worked out much better, because I was the second talk, and it was in a vacation destination. So nice. So wonderful. It was the only bright spot in this past year, and absolutely the reason I didn’t quit. It also helped that the crash space I was at had 3 people crashing. Sigh. I can’t express how happy I was for those 5 days, or how unhappy I was for months previous.
The last one I presented at — it was entirely factional. You spoke to only the people from your school (no one from Dullness was there, but a few people from Canada U were, most of whom left early). The talks weren’t brilliant, either (including mine) — I went there because it was a city I’d always wanted to see, and because if I ever want to work in Canada, it helps to go to Canadian conferences. But I was staying with “family” (4th cousins, his mother and my grandmother grew up together). And I had a wonderful time with them.
Which brings me, yet again, to no point. Except maybe:
Conferences can be fun, if you know people to start your schmoozing with, and especially if they’re less shy than you are. But don’t expect all that much, like for every conference to be as wonderful as that one conference where everything went right.
Nope. No real point. Oh well.
[1] I know, I’m super original.