Not That Kind of Doctor - Conferences & Career Growth
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04/05/2023
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Are academic conferences worth the time, energy, and cost? In this episode of "Not That Kind of Doctor," Guy and Nick dive deep into the world of academic conferences, exploring the pros and cons, strategies for getting the most out of them, and how to navigate the financial and logistical challenges, especially for graduate students and early-career scholars.
We discuss our personal experiences, from the excitement of first conferences to the complexities of choosing which conferences to attend as your career progresses. Whether you’re presenting research, networking, or just trying to keep up with the latest developments in your field, we’ve got tips and insights to help you make the most of your conference experience.
đź“Ś Key Takeaways:
How to decide which conferences are worth attending
Strategies for managing the costs of conference travel
Tips for networking and making meaningful connections
The role of conferences in your academic and professional development
How to avoid burnout and make the most of your conference experience
Whether you're a seasoned academic or just starting out, this episode offers valuable advice on how to navigate the conference circuit effectively.
#AcademicConferences #HigherEducation #NotThatKindOfDoctor #Networking #professionaldevelopment #academia
What are your conference strategies? Share your experiences and tips in the comments below! Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe for more discussions on academic life and beyond!
Conferences - Not That Kind of Doctor with Nick Husbye and Guy Trainin
www.youtube.com/@tltenotthatkindofdoctor
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- [00:00:00.217](upbeat music)
- [00:00:09.668]That the balance is that if there's good enough structure
- [00:00:13.710]around it and clear expectations,
- [00:00:16.710]then our students are really up to the task
- [00:00:20.100]and willing to take on big chunks.
- [00:00:23.100]Oh, yeah.
- [00:00:24.676]It's big chunks
- [00:00:25.509]and ambiguity is a challenging combination.
- [00:00:29.940]Well, did I tell you that in an exit slip?
- [00:00:32.693]No, no.
- [00:00:35.010]I'm on my first day introducing writing,
- [00:00:37.770]I always have a is there anything more
- [00:00:39.060]you'd like me to know or anything you wanna say?
- [00:00:42.480]And several of them were like,
- [00:00:44.400]I don't feel like this was as systematic
- [00:00:47.220]or explicit as it could be.
- [00:00:48.540]Like I like these activities,
- [00:00:50.220]but I don't know why I would do them.
- [00:00:53.010]And I was like, oh. Fair, fair.
- [00:00:58.747]Yes.
- [00:00:59.580]Okay, so let me revise my lesson plan for the next day
- [00:01:03.960]and they're picking it up.
- [00:01:07.080]So speaking of up, where are you flying off to today?
- [00:01:11.430]I am flying to Washington to go to a conference,
- [00:01:15.210]an ARTful Conference.
- [00:01:16.470]So, okay.
- [00:01:17.880]So I myself am mired in the teaching intensity
- [00:01:25.230]of an overload semester.
- [00:01:28.320]You're living your best conference life.
- [00:01:30.570]I am living my best conference life
- [00:01:32.940]because I am under teaching this semester.
- [00:01:37.080]I mean, or teaching just enough?
- [00:01:39.300]Well, that's true and I'm teaching weekends this semester.
- [00:01:43.020]So I spent all of last Saturday with our teachers
- [00:01:49.020]who are part of our grant
- [00:01:50.400]and I'm going to spend all of the next Saturday with them.
- [00:01:54.240]And so I just shifted the load to a different time zone,
- [00:01:58.170]so I can have this opportunity to go
- [00:02:01.470]and really partake in the conference life,
- [00:02:04.170]which I have done more
- [00:02:05.280]than I think I've ever done in my life.
- [00:02:07.890]I mean it feels like I never see you anymore
- [00:02:12.240]because you're always somewhere
- [00:02:14.580]where it's either an hour ahead of me
- [00:02:17.070]or an hour behind me.
- [00:02:18.390]Yeah. Yeah.
- [00:02:20.040]And so you're just out there living the conference life.
- [00:02:26.070]So speaking of conferences,
- [00:02:30.150]when you think about going to conferences,
- [00:02:33.390]what do you remember about your first conference?
- [00:02:36.300]Where'd you go?
- [00:02:37.500]Before we go there?
- [00:02:38.333]Oh, yeah. Okay.
- [00:02:39.390]Before we go there.
- [00:02:40.890]Yeah?
- [00:02:41.850]Welcome to "Not That Kind of Doctor".
- [00:02:43.980]I'm Dr. Nicholas Husbye.
- [00:02:45.270]I'm an Assistant Professor here at,
- [00:02:47.160]or not an Assistant Professor.
- [00:02:48.810]Associate Professor. Associate Professor.
- [00:02:50.910]Come on. Oh, I keep forgetting that.
- [00:02:55.050]Of Elementary Literacy Education K6 here at UNL.
- [00:02:58.440]And this is.
- [00:02:59.430]Guy Trainin, I'm a Professor of Education here at UNL.
- [00:03:03.780]And today we're talking conferences.
- [00:03:05.250]Yes, which I have grown to love
- [00:03:08.970]and I've always had a problematic relationship.
- [00:03:11.010]I want to know more about that
- [00:03:12.390]because I am growing not to love.
- [00:03:15.420]Okay.
- [00:03:18.738]Before I pushed into our intro,
- [00:03:23.940]you'd asked about my first conference.
- [00:03:25.470]And I want to say that my first conference
- [00:03:30.570]as a teacher was the International Reading Association,
- [00:03:37.680]back when they were still
- [00:03:38.610]the International Reading Association,
- [00:03:40.290]now they're the International Literacy Association,
- [00:03:43.800]conference in Toronto.
- [00:03:45.660]And I went as a teacher and kept saying,
- [00:03:52.710]as we're crossing the border into Canada from Michigan
- [00:03:54.467]'cause I lived in Michigan at the time,
- [00:03:56.227]"Oh, I'm going to the IRA conference,"
- [00:03:58.050]which did not at that point in time, hit very well
- [00:04:02.070]and I couldn't figure out why
- [00:04:04.230]and got lots of questions.
- [00:04:05.460]But anyway, that was my first kind of introduction
- [00:04:10.380]to like this is what
- [00:04:14.340]a research slash practitioner conference looks like.
- [00:04:18.420]And I'd had folks that I had studied
- [00:04:22.230]with at Michigan State who were there.
- [00:04:24.000]So they helped me kind of navigate
- [00:04:25.620]what was happening and going on.
- [00:04:27.780]But as a practitioner, I was like what is going on?
- [00:04:31.080]What can I bring back on Monday?
- [00:04:34.020]Yeah.
- [00:04:34.860]And do with my students?
- [00:04:35.910]And so that was a really different perspective.
- [00:04:37.740]Than later on when I would go to, say,
- [00:04:42.510]NCTE which I think was my first big conference
- [00:04:46.740]as a researcher, was a much different kind of experience.
- [00:04:55.020]Because I wasn't necessarily looking for ideas
- [00:04:57.150]to implement in my classroom.
- [00:04:58.290]I was thinking through
- [00:04:59.490]and about who else is doing work in my general field,
- [00:05:02.970]which at that point was really multi-modality and literacy
- [00:05:07.260]and networking with those kind of folks to figure out
- [00:05:12.060]what kind of projects are they doing,
- [00:05:13.680]are there opportunities to interact with one another,
- [00:05:18.180]et cetera, et cetera.
- [00:05:19.020]And so those are my first two, like big conferences.
- [00:05:23.610]What about you?
- [00:05:24.720]For me, the first one was the AERA,
- [00:05:29.490]American Educational Research Association meeting
- [00:05:32.220]in New Orleans, of all places-
- [00:05:34.658]Ooh.
- [00:05:35.491]For the first time.
- [00:05:37.178]And that was definitely a research conference.
- [00:05:38.897](alert dings) And I was a doctoral student
- [00:05:41.490]at the time.
- [00:05:42.390]So I came at it from who's doing work in that field?
- [00:05:47.430]What else is happening? And AERA is enormous.
- [00:05:51.390]Right.
- [00:05:52.223]It's over 10,000 people, most times.
- [00:05:53.640]Post pandemic things have changed a little bit,
- [00:05:55.560]but there were probably 12 to 14,000 people there.
- [00:05:59.340]Lots of sessions over multiple buildings.
- [00:06:02.460]I think we had four hotels
- [00:06:05.940]and all the conference rooms are there
- [00:06:08.310]and you're just trying to navigate.
- [00:06:09.960]This was in the days where there was a book still
- [00:06:12.360]and you flipped through the 80-page book.
- [00:06:16.020]You carried it around,
- [00:06:16.853]they'd give you a tote bag just for the catalog,
- [00:06:18.657]For the catalog, yes.
- [00:06:20.760]And you're quickly trying to find out where to go.
- [00:06:23.760]There wasn't anything searchable.
- [00:06:25.920]I mean there was a key at the end
- [00:06:27.780]and you could just like, oh, I'm interested in writing.
- [00:06:30.546]Okay, there's 72 sessions about writing.
- [00:06:33.930]That's not super helpful.
- [00:06:35.850]All the sticky notes and they were color-coded.
- [00:06:38.793]Was that what you mean? Oh, for you
- [00:06:39.626]they were colored, yeah.
- [00:06:41.040]I had never sticky noted that one.
- [00:06:45.570]But I was excited.
- [00:06:48.180]I found it really intellectually stimulating
- [00:06:50.340]in a way that sometimes, especially,
- [00:06:52.950]I'm again going back,
- [00:06:54.570]I went to University of California, Riverside,
- [00:06:56.580]which is a UC, but it's not one of the big ones.
- [00:07:00.630]And also coming from Israel,
- [00:07:03.540]I'm like I don't know where I am
- [00:07:04.830]even on this map of research.
- [00:07:06.900]So the most exciting thing for me was to find out,
- [00:07:09.690]yeah, I'm about where I'm supposed to be.
- [00:07:11.730]I can have a discussion with people
- [00:07:13.890]who are doing research in the field
- [00:07:15.210]without feeling like a complete idiot.
- [00:07:17.370]So a little less imposter syndrome.
- [00:07:21.486]That was the biggest thing.
- [00:07:22.319]We were not presenting at that conference.
- [00:07:24.330]We presented in the following conferences,
- [00:07:26.310]the work we were doing at the time in early reading.
- [00:07:29.880]So I've learned that piece.
- [00:07:31.560]So the first time I went,
- [00:07:32.970]we didn't actually have a presentation,
- [00:07:35.010]which was very freeing in some ways.
- [00:07:38.430]But the being overwhelmed
- [00:07:40.170]by just the sheer size of everything
- [00:07:42.690]and running between sessions
- [00:07:45.210]and finding out what is the roundtable,
- [00:07:47.190]what are poster sessions
- [00:07:48.390]and all that, because it was all new to me.
- [00:07:51.540]Right, and there's all of these,
- [00:07:56.698]like I'm exhausted thinking about all the travel
- [00:07:59.820]you're doing right now.
- [00:08:01.305](chuckles) Yeah.
- [00:08:02.561]Because I keep thinking about,
- [00:08:03.394]and here's part of the reason why I'm like,
- [00:08:04.920]ugh, conferences.
- [00:08:06.990]What are we doing together?
- [00:08:08.550]Like do we need couples therapy?
- [00:08:11.550]I don't quite know.
- [00:08:13.470]Because I just look at a conference
- [00:08:15.570]and think what is the value added to who I am
- [00:08:20.487]and what I do at that particular point in time.
- [00:08:24.750]Because with the advent of just social media,
- [00:08:30.000]digital technology, like networking is not as difficult
- [00:08:33.810]as I feel like it might used to have been, right?
- [00:08:37.589]Yeah. Like so establishing
- [00:08:39.450]and maintaining those connections is easy.
- [00:08:42.597]And also realizing that at the spot where I am in my career,
- [00:08:49.170]I've kind of got my people-
- [00:08:51.300]Yes,
- [00:08:52.359]and which is different. My academic siblings.
- [00:08:54.030]My academic peer group and I kinda know who they are
- [00:08:57.900]and am in general touch with them
- [00:09:00.900]even when we're not in conferences.
- [00:09:03.810]And so thinking about what is it
- [00:09:09.510]that this conference is going to do for me?
- [00:09:11.790]Um-hmm, and I think that's important.
- [00:09:13.533]It's an interesting question
- [00:09:15.330]and changes as you're moving from like grad student
- [00:09:21.540]to assistant professor-
- [00:09:22.890]To associate professor.
- [00:09:24.240]Associate professor. When you remember it.
- [00:09:25.860]Which I am an Associate Professor?
- [00:09:28.290]I am an Associate Professor, period?
- [00:09:30.390]I don't know.
- [00:09:31.223]Yeah. Whatever that means.
- [00:09:32.157]And I think that you're right,
- [00:09:33.960]that you have to always think about the costs, right.
- [00:09:37.260]There are personal costs and there are-
- [00:09:39.090]Costs and costs.
- [00:09:40.140]Yes. Yeah. Like time and energy.
- [00:09:42.510]Time, energy
- [00:09:43.470]and the fact that if you're not on campus teaching,
- [00:09:48.570]there's going to be a backlog of things
- [00:09:50.580]that you took three, four days and you're away.
- [00:09:53.940]It's still waiting for you
- [00:09:54.833]and you have to undo that.
- [00:09:57.420]And that's discombobulating,
- [00:09:58.980]definitely if there's a time difference
- [00:10:00.780]and that hurts as well.
- [00:10:04.302]And the second cost, and I hate bringing this,
- [00:10:07.170]but it's very important I think for justifying,
- [00:10:10.530]there's a cost, there's an environmental cost.
- [00:10:13.710]You get on an airplane. You travel.
- [00:10:15.930]You do all of these things, it's gotta be worth it.
- [00:10:19.200]You're not just going for the fun of it,
- [00:10:23.580]because that has a cost.
- [00:10:25.470]And also it may not be as fun as you'd like it to be.
- [00:10:28.903]I mean, yeah. I'm trying to think of the last,
- [00:10:33.000]like conferences I feel are stressful,
- [00:10:34.620]particularly, if you're presenting
- [00:10:36.240]or if you're on the board for that particular organization
- [00:10:41.100]or it's stressful because of like life is still going on.
- [00:10:48.780]My class is still moving forward.
- [00:10:51.210]I have planned for them to be doing stuff while I'm gone,
- [00:10:54.330]but chances are they're gonna have questions.
- [00:10:56.670]Email is piling up.
- [00:10:58.950]Normally, you always have the best intentions.
- [00:11:01.140]Oh, my presentation'll be done before I get on the plane.
- [00:11:03.600]Or I'll do the presentation-
- [00:11:04.740]on the plane.
- [00:11:05.850]And then I miss half the conference
- [00:11:08.943]because I'm putting together my presentation.
- [00:11:10.710]My favorite conferences are the ones
- [00:11:12.390]where I present first slot
- [00:11:16.740]because I have to have it done.
- [00:11:18.780]Yeah. Yes.
- [00:11:19.613]And then it's over
- [00:11:20.580]and then I'm through it, like it's great.
- [00:11:23.370]But that so rarely happens,
- [00:11:25.200]even though I often request it, right.
- [00:11:27.660]But so there's,
- [00:11:32.550]for those who are teaching, pro-tip I feel,
- [00:11:36.870]is if there's a conference
- [00:11:38.880]that you think you're going to
- [00:11:40.050]as you're pulling together your course schedules
- [00:11:42.390]at the beginning of the semester, build that in.
- [00:11:45.900]Make notes for yourself.
- [00:11:47.610]Like, oh, this is gonna be an online asynchronous day.
- [00:11:50.670]Here's what you're going to do.
- [00:11:52.680]Here's how it fits within the larger scheme.
- [00:11:55.050]So you're not playing catch up.
- [00:11:58.740]Because you go to this conference,
- [00:12:02.700]it's a lot of energy and you come back
- [00:12:04.350]and you have to exert a lot more energy to get caught up.
- [00:12:08.310]Versus if you can do some planning,
- [00:12:09.840]that's a little bit more helpful.
- [00:12:10.750]Yeah, and as a result, for the longest time
- [00:12:13.890]as a graduate student, I just went when I could
- [00:12:16.050]and that has a lot to do with money
- [00:12:17.640]and we'll talk about that in a second.
- [00:12:19.920]But I used to have, as a young faculty member,
- [00:12:23.550]I used to have two conferences.
- [00:12:24.720]I had a fall conference and a spring conference.
- [00:12:26.610]And my fall conference was usually,
- [00:12:28.410]not always, what is now LRA and used to be NRC,
- [00:12:33.270]so the Literacy Research Association
- [00:12:35.790]and before that it was National Reading Conference.
- [00:12:39.690]And so that was a place and that was much smaller.
- [00:12:44.910]So we talk about AERA in this huge 12,000, 14,000.
- [00:12:48.540]This is a much smaller conference
- [00:12:50.190]and that's a conference that for a long time,
- [00:12:51.990]I felt at home at.
- [00:12:53.760]It was a smaller group of people that I got to know.
- [00:12:56.580]Lots of conversations, lots of networking
- [00:12:59.730]that I found more useful because it's really hard to network
- [00:13:03.600]when you get to a space with 12,000 people
- [00:13:06.780]and you're like, I don't know who to talk to
- [00:13:09.390]and what to talk about.
- [00:13:10.980]And eventually, I found my way around that,
- [00:13:12.870]but those are challenges.
- [00:13:14.460]So when you say I'm not sure what I'm gaining,
- [00:13:17.730]I think it's important to say especially
- [00:13:20.307]what do you gain early in your career
- [00:13:22.320]when you're going to conferences?
- [00:13:24.180]Well, I feel earlier in my career
- [00:13:26.430]it was a lot about, like I can sit back
- [00:13:30.150]and say, "Oh, I'm in touch with my peer group
- [00:13:32.520]who do similar work as I do."
- [00:13:35.430]Because I went to those conferences early, right?
- [00:13:37.980]Like it was an opportunity to meet these folks, in-person
- [00:13:44.490]and then we transitioned that relationship into email,
- [00:13:49.170]texting, et cetera, et cetera.
- [00:13:51.150]Shared Google Docs.
- [00:13:54.570]That's not to say
- [00:13:55.500]that there wasn't a function early in my career.
- [00:13:58.710]It helped me think through also,
- [00:14:01.740]like you had said earlier, where's my niche?
- [00:14:05.790]Where's my space?
- [00:14:09.900]I don't feel like an imposter,
- [00:14:12.566]so I'm not quite sure what that's like.
- [00:14:13.410]So I'm gonna work on that.
- [00:14:15.060]How do conferences help you not feel like an imposter?
- [00:14:20.070]'Cause that I feel like never goes away.
- [00:14:22.530]No, it doesn't entirely go away.
- [00:14:24.750]In every space, there's a moment where you're like,
- [00:14:28.920]is this my space?
- [00:14:30.000]I think it's there always,
- [00:14:32.370]but you can own a part of that space,
- [00:14:35.070]especially in smaller groups.
- [00:14:37.020]And so if you find, AERA has Special Interest Groups,
- [00:14:41.130]ACTE has TAGs, Topical Action Groups,
- [00:14:47.490]the word action is fantastic in there.
- [00:14:49.650]And so it's a way to create a smaller group
- [00:14:55.320]where you actually get to know people.
- [00:14:58.110]At AERA, for a long time
- [00:14:59.910]I was part of the Motivation, Special Interest Group.
- [00:15:02.460]There's always a dinner.
- [00:15:04.110]If you're a student or a young faculty member,
- [00:15:06.600]go to that dinner.
- [00:15:08.130]It's always fun.
- [00:15:09.750]And your strategy, you've mentioned this before
- [00:15:12.417]when we were talking about networking,
- [00:15:13.950]which maybe we can tile it somewhere here.
- [00:15:16.890]I don't know how that works anymore.
- [00:15:19.620]But you would sit next to someone,
- [00:15:21.510]you'd get up, you'd move and sit next to someone different
- [00:15:24.990]because you are a gregarious social butterfly.
- [00:15:28.620]And I had to teach myself how to do that,
- [00:15:31.860]because the instinct is to stay with your people.
- [00:15:33.930]And I always showed up with one or two people from UNL
- [00:15:38.160]who are with me and then it dawned on me,
- [00:15:40.080]why am I sitting with the people
- [00:15:41.430]I talk to three times a week?
- [00:15:43.170]I mean one of them was Kathy Wilson, a great friend,
- [00:15:45.720]but I was literally in her office twice a week
- [00:15:49.170]talking about 311, 313.
- [00:15:50.790]How are we gonna teach? What are we gonna do?
- [00:15:52.350]How are you doing this?
- [00:15:53.220]How are you doing this? All of that.
- [00:15:55.050]It's like why am I sitting next to Kathy,
- [00:15:58.530]the only person I know here?
- [00:15:59.970]But it is our instinct to go to the place that is safe.
- [00:16:02.580]And that's when I started having the strategy
- [00:16:04.800]of just grabbing my chair and moving somewhere else
- [00:16:07.320]and having a conversation, between courses kind of thing.
- [00:16:10.863]It's a little bit more strategic than that.
- [00:16:13.470]Because that would give me such social anxiety.
- [00:16:16.440]But I would go to, like you said, index,
- [00:16:20.070]who's doing work in the field in which I work
- [00:16:23.850]and I would have some pointed conversations with them.
- [00:16:27.030]So I'd have done a little bit of background knowledge.
- [00:16:31.170]Like that's how met, oh wow,
- [00:16:32.400]my friend Candance Doerr-Stevens,
- [00:16:34.770]who's at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
- [00:16:37.350]that's how we met as grad students.
- [00:16:39.240]'Cause I knew she was doing work around multi-modality
- [00:16:42.300]and, particularly, sound and that was fascinating to me.
- [00:16:46.170]And so I would kind of stalk and be like, "Hey, what's up?"
- [00:16:53.790]You know?
- [00:16:55.024]But also at that same time, Karen Wolman,
- [00:16:57.870]who was on my committee, was also very good.
- [00:17:04.230]And this is something that as an Associate Professor
- [00:17:07.140]I need to be thinking about,
- [00:17:08.160]as my graduate students are going to conferences, as well.
- [00:17:12.900]She was a delightful lever for introducing me to people.
- [00:17:21.540]So like, oh, this is Jennifer Rozell.
- [00:17:24.480]Oh, this is Cynthia Lu.
- [00:17:25.920]Yeah.
- [00:17:26.753]So people that were doing really important work
- [00:17:31.170]and continue to do really important work in my field,
- [00:17:34.440]I had introductions to them.
- [00:17:35.910]They knew who I was.
- [00:17:36.990]So when I ran into them at the airport,
- [00:17:38.580]it would be like, "Hey, how is life?"
- [00:17:40.560]Da da-da-da-da, right.
- [00:17:45.034]So that function of conferences has changed as well?
- [00:17:49.080]Yeah.
- [00:17:50.460]But getting to know those people was super handy.
- [00:17:53.940]But it was a bit more targeted,
- [00:17:56.130]in terms of like my own introductions.
- [00:17:58.530]Yeah, and I think that would be helpful.
- [00:18:00.600]And I was just not that thoughtful and not that organized.
- [00:18:06.840]I think there's a pattern there.
- [00:18:08.670]I let things fall where they may.
- [00:18:11.700]So tip of the hat,
- [00:18:14.010]Sarah Vander Zanden taught me how to do that.
- [00:18:16.500]She's at University of Northern Iowa
- [00:18:18.240]and she was so thoughtful.
- [00:18:22.080]Rooming with her for a conference
- [00:18:24.690]and seeing how she organized her thinking
- [00:18:27.390]around I'm gonna go see this person for this reason,
- [00:18:29.880]this person for this reason.
- [00:18:33.660]As a first year grad student kind of blew my mind.
- [00:18:36.120]Yeah, and I think especially when I go with students,
- [00:18:39.390]I do a few things.
- [00:18:40.290]One is I help them plan.
- [00:18:42.360]So I am planful from that perspective.
- [00:18:44.790]Who is at this conference that you wanna meet?
- [00:18:47.400]Who is this at this conference even you want to just hear?
- [00:18:50.790]Because there are some names in our fields,
- [00:18:53.310]especially when you are early, that are the biggest names
- [00:18:56.670]and you want to hear them at least once in person.
- [00:18:59.880]You want to hear what they're doing and thinking right now.
- [00:19:02.190]Because if you're reading an article,
- [00:19:04.560]they wrote it three, four years ago
- [00:19:06.840]with data from maybe two more years.
- [00:19:08.820]So you're reading about what they thought five years ago,
- [00:19:11.700]maybe four years ago.
- [00:19:13.110]Now they're doing and thinking about something else.
- [00:19:15.480]And that's when you ask why go to conference,
- [00:19:18.450]that's one of the reasons.
- [00:19:19.550]Is is you're hearing about what people are doing right now,
- [00:19:22.560]that they will publish in a few years
- [00:19:24.480]unless they're actually working it backwards.
- [00:19:26.790]Because for me,
- [00:19:27.720]I'm looking for the newest thing when I go to a conference
- [00:19:30.150]and this is also what I'm presenting.
- [00:19:31.590]I'm presenting what I haven't published yet,
- [00:19:34.080]not what I've already published.
- [00:19:35.730]I know some people do it that way,
- [00:19:37.350]because it's an opportunity to go.
- [00:19:39.510]But for me, it's a future oriented because if I'm going
- [00:19:44.430]and I'm presenting about what I'm doing right now.
- [00:19:47.160]I'm getting free feedback.
- [00:19:48.690]Not so free, because you're paying for the conference.
- [00:19:50.610]But I'm getting feedback on the work.
- [00:19:52.290]I'm getting ideas. I'm getting some citations.
- [00:19:54.780]I'm getting some critique at a low,
- [00:19:57.210]at least most of our conferences,
- [00:19:59.070]do not have really people jumping at you
- [00:20:01.980]or criticizing you in a negative way.
- [00:20:04.650]Once in a while that happens,
- [00:20:05.880]but most of the time it doesn't.
- [00:20:07.620]And so it supports me in developing those manuscripts going.
- [00:20:11.190]So that's a reason to go.
- [00:20:12.810]And the the other thing in my metaphor
- [00:20:16.290]is really making a pilgrimage.
- [00:20:18.780]And that is one of the important things
- [00:20:21.480]about making the pilgrimage is not being in the place
- [00:20:25.500]as much as being on the way
- [00:20:27.420]and creating that sense of being in a sacred space.
- [00:20:35.550]And I wanna use this really carefully, but-
- [00:20:38.730]I'm interested in where this is going.
- [00:20:40.429]Yeah, yeah, but in that once you get up from your office
- [00:20:46.440]and you go to Chicago, New Orleans, in my case,
- [00:20:49.050]Washington D.C., now or wherever you are going,
- [00:20:51.630]you are not in your office.
- [00:20:53.340]Your students are far away.
- [00:20:54.930]You can make the agreement with yourself
- [00:20:56.610]to ignore your email for a few days
- [00:20:58.830]or to take care of it early in the morning
- [00:21:00.900]and then not do it, whatever.
- [00:21:02.700]But you have space to have conversations
- [00:21:07.440]and to listen in a way that, I think,
- [00:21:09.960]in our daily academic lives we'd like to pretend
- [00:21:12.930]that we sit at least an hour and a half a day
- [00:21:14.610]and read professionally.
- [00:21:16.920]But most of us don't.
- [00:21:18.210]We just don't have enough time.
- [00:21:19.890]And we definitely don't have enough time,
- [00:21:21.750]I think, to have really deep conversations
- [00:21:23.835]that are at the edge of where our research is.
- [00:21:27.060]So I find that ability to say for three days,
- [00:21:30.330]this is what I'm going to be doing, powerful.
- [00:21:33.330]All the conferences that I've participated on online,
- [00:21:36.090]and I've loved them because I didn't need
- [00:21:37.440]to get out of my office and the cost is minimal,
- [00:21:40.500]you're paying for the participation,
- [00:21:42.270]but you're not traveling.
- [00:21:43.440]You're not wasting time. You're not parking your car.
- [00:21:45.720]All of that is fantastic.
- [00:21:47.100]But I find that I go to three sessions, maybe.
- [00:21:49.860]I go to my session, because I kinda have to,
- [00:21:52.470]and then I go to two more sessions
- [00:21:54.150]that I really, really want.
- [00:21:55.770]And everything else I have great intents,
- [00:21:57.720]but I never actually get to them
- [00:21:59.340]because I'm still in my office.
- [00:22:00.870]People knock on the door.
- [00:22:02.370]I have tasks that I feel like, I'm at work.
- [00:22:06.450]I should be doing all of this work
- [00:22:08.310]and so it's not happening quite as effectively.
- [00:22:11.010]I think that is why the face-to-face conference,
- [00:22:15.300]even post pandemic, is surviving.
- [00:22:17.670]Is that it provides that space
- [00:22:20.400]and in my case also a delightful way,
- [00:22:23.970]especially during social events,
- [00:22:25.830]to find new emerging scholars
- [00:22:29.160]and have productive conversations with them.
- [00:22:31.680]That may end up, in my case,
- [00:22:33.180]may end up with some collaboration.
- [00:22:34.980]May end up with us never meeting again.
- [00:22:37.020]But still that energy of young researcher-
- [00:22:42.456]Whoa, whoa-whoa, we're getting into vampire-
- [00:22:44.100]Is fantastic.
- [00:22:45.750]Are you an energy vampire?
- [00:22:48.750]Um, I, no. Yes.
- [00:22:52.327]Okay, yes? No? Yes.
- [00:22:53.933]A little bit.
- [00:22:54.766]Okay.
- [00:22:55.599]A little bit.
- [00:22:56.432]It's important to come out. I enjoy that energy.
- [00:22:59.172]As a vampire. Thank you.
- [00:23:00.174]Thank you.
- [00:23:01.007]I support you.
- [00:23:01.990]I feel supported. I feel seen.
- [00:23:03.420]Okay. Good.
- [00:23:05.100]Good. It explains the black today.
- [00:23:06.780]Yes.
- [00:23:08.370]So- All right
- [00:23:10.320]and the shade's going down.
- [00:23:12.738]So I do wanna highlight one other kind of pro
- [00:23:14.730]that was important as you were talking
- [00:23:17.070]is when we're thinking about conferences,
- [00:23:22.860]utilizing that space as a way to play with data,
- [00:23:27.630]play with analysis, get some feedback on it
- [00:23:30.990]and turning that then into a manuscript
- [00:23:34.410]that you then send out for publication.
- [00:23:36.510]Um-hmm, absolutely.
- [00:23:39.150]One of the things that I do miss about conferences
- [00:23:41.640]as we're thinking about these like conferences
- [00:23:44.370]as kind of liminal spaces where we're neither here nor there
- [00:23:49.080]is my conference group, we would always come together,
- [00:23:55.080]find a coffee shop and we would work.
- [00:23:58.140]Like we would, literally, write for about three hours
- [00:24:01.560]with each other.
- [00:24:03.090]And it's not so common
- [00:24:06.840]now that we have that common time together.
- [00:24:10.020]So we could be like, "Hey, when you are at a spot
- [00:24:12.690]where you can stop, can I run this by you?
- [00:24:14.550]This is what I'm trying to think through
- [00:24:16.020]and work my way through."
- [00:24:17.910]And so the ability to have that writing time together,
- [00:24:21.570]that work time together,
- [00:24:24.060]there's something really powerful about that.
- [00:24:27.690]There's something really powerful about being in that space.
- [00:24:35.220]So like when I went to the conference in Dublin
- [00:24:38.340]this past summer, one of the things that was so powerful
- [00:24:43.320]about being there was it pushed me through some stuff,
- [00:24:48.150]some writing that I didn't have time to get to.
- [00:24:51.660]That I didn't have the time
- [00:24:52.800]and space and brain energy to get to.
- [00:24:56.964]And so just pointing that out.
- [00:24:58.800]And you speaking of Dublin
- [00:25:01.710]reminded me that in the big conferences,
- [00:25:04.140]not necessarily in the small one,
- [00:25:05.790]or depending on for example,
- [00:25:09.060]the Society for Comparative International Education,
- [00:25:14.130]what we're talking about is also the opportunity
- [00:25:17.610]to meet international scholars.
- [00:25:19.740]And that presents with new opportunities
- [00:25:22.860]to do some interesting research
- [00:25:24.360]that is not so confined locally.
- [00:25:26.310]I love my local context
- [00:25:28.230]and I think it's really important
- [00:25:29.550]to work in our local context first and foremost.
- [00:25:32.160]But international collaborations opens up the idea
- [00:25:35.970]that we can learn from other places
- [00:25:39.780]and they can learn from us
- [00:25:41.400]and we can have honest conversations about this.
- [00:25:43.800]I'm laughing because that's one of my disappointments
- [00:25:46.530]about that Dublin conference was that it was the first
- [00:25:49.740]international conference post COVID lifting.
- [00:25:52.890]Not that we're post COVID, COVID's still around.
- [00:25:54.780]But you know what I mean.
- [00:25:56.640]And it was a very American slate
- [00:25:59.760]and so I got there and I looked at the program
- [00:26:01.902]and was like, oh, that's not the function.
- [00:26:05.640]It's not how this is supposed to function.
- [00:26:07.410]This could be St. Louis.
- [00:26:08.820]Oh, it could be St. Louis.
- [00:26:10.500]It could be Columbus, Ohio.
- [00:26:12.929]It could be anywhere
- [00:26:13.762]and so that was a little bit of a drag.
- [00:26:15.540]But sometimes it's a crapshoot.
- [00:26:18.930]So what are your conferences?
- [00:26:21.510]I don't know, actually.
- [00:26:23.040]I'm in-
- [00:26:24.270]What used to be your conferences?
- [00:26:26.640]What used to be my conferences?
- [00:26:30.030]So what used to be my conferences were LRA,
- [00:26:35.520]so Literacy Research Association;
- [00:26:37.680]and then also thinking about NCTE,
- [00:26:42.780]so National Council of Teachers of English;
- [00:26:46.860]IRA, International Reading Association;
- [00:26:49.710]and then the Association of Literacy Educators
- [00:26:52.350]and Researchers.
- [00:26:53.670]So those were kind of my big conferences and-
- [00:27:00.210]Did you alternate
- [00:27:03.330]or did you go to all of them each year?
- [00:27:05.040]I didn't go to all of them each year.
- [00:27:06.690]Okay.
- [00:27:07.523]I would go here and there.
- [00:27:11.460]Kind of where I'm at in this,
- [00:27:15.150]conferences, what are we to one another?
- [00:27:17.370]Yeah.
- [00:27:18.479]What is our role?
- [00:27:21.102]Is really trying to think through where folks are grappling
- [00:27:27.090]with the same questions I'm grappling with
- [00:27:32.280]and it's tricky to figure out
- [00:27:34.620]where those people are right now, right.
- [00:27:37.110]Yeah.
- [00:27:38.010]My research interests have shifted
- [00:27:39.960]and changed and evolved.
- [00:27:42.450]And that requires remapping, for sure.
- [00:27:44.610]And that requires some remapping of the terrain, right.
- [00:27:47.460]And I've actually found, there's a small private conference
- [00:27:54.030]called Learning to Teach
- [00:27:55.140]that gets convened every once in a while
- [00:27:57.330]and that's actually been my favorite set of conferences ever
- [00:28:04.050]'cause it's normally we go in,
- [00:28:06.870]we dive into this is what teacher preparation
- [00:28:10.320]looks like right now.
- [00:28:14.520]And there's some time to present a little bit of work,
- [00:28:18.030]but it's a lot of actual like collaborative work time
- [00:28:23.490]and space around these ideas of teacher education.
- [00:28:27.058]And that's how I always thought about
- [00:28:27.891]the LRA morning groups.
- [00:28:29.340]If you wake up early enough,
- [00:28:30.690]I think they're 7:30 in the morning. (chuckles)
- [00:28:32.790]Yeah, but imagine like four days of that.
- [00:28:34.290]Yeah, that'll be fantastic, yes.
- [00:28:36.660]So I get a little spoiled.
- [00:28:39.540]I'm thinking about the Assembly of Research for NCTEAR
- [00:28:44.010]as being another space that I think I wanna get back to,
- [00:28:48.144]'cause that's really about
- [00:28:51.540]getting into the work of the research
- [00:28:56.130]and how we're talking about the research.
- [00:28:58.500]And LRA, NCTE have kind of started
- [00:29:03.570]to feel a little bit like high school.
- [00:29:05.520]Hmm, yeah.
- [00:29:07.020]Where like you've got your cliques
- [00:29:09.780]and I'm not so much interested in that
- [00:29:14.130]at this point in my career.
- [00:29:16.950]I'm really interested in, okay, so what?
- [00:29:21.060]Like the world is burning.
- [00:29:22.680]To go back to you, like what's the cost of this plane ticket
- [00:29:26.040]and the fuel?
- [00:29:26.873]And like the world is burning.
- [00:29:30.690]Public education is being dismantled.
- [00:29:33.570]The roles and professionalization of teachers
- [00:29:36.420]is constantly being called into question.
- [00:29:39.810]What are we doing?
- [00:29:40.643]What are we doing about it?
- [00:29:43.282]And if we're not having actual conversations about that,
- [00:29:46.197]I'm not particularly interested.
- [00:29:49.230]Yeah, and-
- [00:29:51.690]And that's why I'm single.
- [00:29:53.765](both chuckling)
- [00:29:58.140]All right. That was not the turn I was expecting,
- [00:30:02.226]but okay.
- [00:30:04.094]For me that has really transformed.
- [00:30:05.580]I used to do LRA and AERA for many years. Those were my two.
- [00:30:09.420]AERA was my big, you get ideas from somewhere else,
- [00:30:12.570]you go and sample different ideas.
- [00:30:17.111]And usually say, "Well, that's nice but not for me."
- [00:30:20.850]But you get that and then LRA was my more like home.
- [00:30:26.070]This is where I'm learning
- [00:30:28.080]and I'm working with other people,
- [00:30:30.420]that has really transformed.
- [00:30:31.950]And right now the Society for Information Technology
- [00:30:34.500]and Teacher Education is kind of my home.
- [00:30:36.480]It's a very small, very friendly conference.
- [00:30:40.260]You get to talk to a lot of people
- [00:30:42.660]that are doing similar things
- [00:30:44.070]or things that, at least, are adjacent.
- [00:30:46.260]Great conversations about AI in the last year.
- [00:30:50.010]And I love the fact
- [00:30:51.030]that there were really balanced conversations,
- [00:30:52.890]because the world is burning
- [00:30:54.060]and AI may be actually pouring gasoline on top of this,
- [00:30:57.900]conversation for another time.
- [00:30:59.370]But it has some great potential-
- [00:31:00.465]Great way to stress me out.
- [00:31:01.530]Yeah, you're welcome. Way to go.
- [00:31:02.800]Well, you're welcome.
- [00:31:04.200]And so that's a way for me to think about this
- [00:31:08.970]and then I sample.
- [00:31:10.200]AACTE is the one I go to, probably most often,
- [00:31:15.840]and that is because it is in the center of my work life
- [00:31:21.270]as a teacher educator.
- [00:31:22.860]I get great ideas and I have conversations
- [00:31:26.130]about system change within teacher education
- [00:31:29.400]that we're not really having in other places.
- [00:31:31.680]And especially, the ability to innovate around diversifying
- [00:31:35.310]the teacher workforce and those kind of things.
- [00:31:37.290]That has been a lot of energy for me.
- [00:31:39.180]I wonder if I just went on a bad year.
- [00:31:41.359]'Cause my AACTE Conference experience has not been great.
- [00:31:45.180]Yeah, and you've gotta be really selective
- [00:31:48.060]in what you are doing there and who you're talking to.
- [00:31:52.200]I've had different experiences in different years,
- [00:31:55.050]but it's been really productive
- [00:31:57.270]for a work-life kind of perspective.
- [00:32:01.980]So let's go into the cost,
- [00:32:05.910]especially, for graduate students.
- [00:32:07.410]How do graduate students actually go,
- [00:32:10.050]considering how much flights are now
- [00:32:12.660]and hotels and all of that?
- [00:32:16.380]So some of my strategies when I was a graduate student
- [00:32:19.950]was what's nearby?
- [00:32:22.470]Um-hmm, absolutely. What is close?
- [00:32:24.660]What is within driving distance?
- [00:32:26.220]Are there other folks that I could go with?
- [00:32:29.160]Are there people I can share an Airbnb with?
- [00:32:33.706]'Cause we didn't have funding available to us
- [00:32:37.590]for conference travel.
- [00:32:38.940]Some institutions do.
- [00:32:40.680]Some have scholarships,
- [00:32:41.760]some have grants that fund those conference experiences.
- [00:32:47.160]But in graduate school, a lot of that was around,
- [00:32:51.990]oh, what can I actually get to?
- [00:32:54.240]Yeah.
- [00:32:55.485]And will it be enough of a match
- [00:32:59.100]and can I get other people to go with me
- [00:33:00.630]to kind of split that cost, right?
- [00:33:03.390]Yeah. There you go.
- [00:33:05.430]How many times was my SUV filled with people
- [00:33:07.500]driving to a conference,
- [00:33:10.560]'cause we were all grad students
- [00:33:11.580]and poor, right, like. Yeah.
- [00:33:13.530]And so that's one way.
- [00:33:15.210]The second thing is if you're a graduate student,
- [00:33:19.380]especially or a young faculty member,
- [00:33:22.380]remember that the hotel where everything is happening
- [00:33:26.940]is probably going to be too expensive.
- [00:33:28.950]There are always options that are a little bit farther away
- [00:33:31.680]within walking distance or an Uber drive
- [00:33:34.200]and it's completely worth it.
- [00:33:35.310]If you have your own car,
- [00:33:38.382]you know everybody getting into somebody's car
- [00:33:40.050]and getting in, it gets even easier,
- [00:33:41.940]because then it's easy.
- [00:33:42.930]The only problem is in major cities
- [00:33:44.940]parking for the day can be a real challenge.
- [00:33:48.840]That's gotta be part of your plan.
- [00:33:51.420]Always ask for funding. Always ask.
- [00:33:54.210]You don't know what money is available.
- [00:33:56.010]And if you don't ask, you're definitely not getting,
- [00:33:58.620]right now at UNL you can ask from the graduate college
- [00:34:02.820]from our own college and from the Department,
- [00:34:05.280]nobody's giving you coverage for the whole thing.
- [00:34:07.770]But everybody's giving you a little bit
- [00:34:09.900]and you can cobble it together.
- [00:34:11.700]If you have an advisor
- [00:34:12.810]or you're working on a research grant,
- [00:34:14.490]ask if it can cover it.
- [00:34:16.350]And it's always, always, always better if you actually
- [00:34:19.620]have a presentation on the conference.
- [00:34:22.290]So always send, if you intend to maybe go,
- [00:34:26.190]send a few proposals.
- [00:34:28.080]Increase your odds of being of actually representing
- [00:34:31.740]and then it's much easier to advocate for funds.
- [00:34:34.950]Also, it gives you feedback.
- [00:34:36.630]Again, going back to if you've done research
- [00:34:39.240]this will give you feedback
- [00:34:42.641]and some organizations have some limited,
- [00:34:44.940]very limited travel funds that you can apply for.
- [00:34:47.820]So check also the organization.
- [00:34:50.280]It's never a lot, but it is a little bit
- [00:34:54.090]and any little bit can help in that trying to cobble and go.
- [00:34:58.290]Because I think especially as a young scholar,
- [00:35:00.090]it is incredibly important to go and get to know people,
- [00:35:02.700]network, listen to what's happening.
- [00:35:04.950]And also understand,
- [00:35:06.300]going back to my ongoing discussion about genre,
- [00:35:09.270]understand the genre of what does it mean
- [00:35:11.670]to do a conference presentation which is 12 minutes long
- [00:35:14.370]with three minutes for questions and answer.
- [00:35:16.380]That's very different then-
- [00:35:17.457]And it's usually all lit review.
- [00:35:20.160]Yes.
- [00:35:20.993]Don't do that.
- [00:35:22.064]Please don't do that.
- [00:35:22.897]Please don't do that.
- [00:35:23.967]Oh, my gosh.
- [00:35:24.800]If you're spending more than one minute
- [00:35:26.100]on your lit review, it's too much.
- [00:35:29.130]We come to your session to hear what you have to say
- [00:35:32.183]and innovate- Give them three.
- [00:35:33.540]Okay.
- [00:35:34.373]Be kind. Like what can you do in a minute?
- [00:35:37.740]Say here's my lit review on the slide.
- [00:35:41.250]You can read it in your spare time.
- [00:35:43.090]In three minutes you can give them,
- [00:35:44.540]here are the three big spots in my lit review.
- [00:35:46.830]Here's a really quick sentence about each of them.
- [00:35:48.900]Here's some citations.
- [00:35:50.040]There's a Google Doc that gives you the whole citation
- [00:35:52.020]if you want it later.
- [00:35:53.400]But yeah, like also think through at a real nuts
- [00:36:00.510]and bolts level, look at early bird registration,
- [00:36:05.160]'cause oftentimes, early bird registration
- [00:36:06.810]will be slightly less expensive.
- [00:36:09.330]And students.
- [00:36:10.530]Yes, so grad student levels, early bird registration.
- [00:36:16.410]Sometimes early bird registration,
- [00:36:21.690]from like a budget perspective,
- [00:36:25.320]for me at times wasn't worth it
- [00:36:27.630]to outlay the money-
- [00:36:28.996]If it's $15 or $20, it's not enough of a difference.
- [00:36:31.640]Right, if it's $100, then that's a bigger difference.
- [00:36:36.600]Also thinking about the scale of the conferences,
- [00:36:41.010]some of the smaller conferences are less expensive to go to
- [00:36:45.720]and so one of the things I always enjoyed
- [00:36:49.890]about the smaller conference,
- [00:36:50.970]like NCTEAR the Assembly of Research,
- [00:36:52.800]was you're forced to have face-time
- [00:36:59.010]with some bigger scholars in the field
- [00:37:02.610]because of how the nature of that is set up
- [00:37:05.190]and there's more stuff included in that conference fee.
- [00:37:09.840]So like, oh, you mean all my snacks
- [00:37:12.960]are included here for the entire day?
- [00:37:14.550]So I don't necessarily need to pay for lunch.
- [00:37:16.410]Those kinds of things.
- [00:37:17.280]So find those things out
- [00:37:21.120]and leveraging those smaller conferences
- [00:37:26.280]that are gonna be a little bit cheaper over the-
- [00:37:28.950]Maybe more local.
- [00:37:30.570]More local, more regional, et cetera, et cetera.
- [00:37:34.650]I find that to be helpful
- [00:37:38.130]as I'm thinking about how to afford it.
- [00:37:41.640]Absolutely.
- [00:37:42.473]All right, so we talked a lot about conferences.
- [00:37:45.510]We want you to go,
- [00:37:46.560]but also be really thoughtful about where you're going.
- [00:37:49.080]My biggest question,
- [00:37:50.370]and this is something I always grapple with,
- [00:37:51.990]because I always get to that point in the conference
- [00:37:55.320]where I feel like my brain is completely full
- [00:37:58.440]and I don't know how to process anymore.
- [00:38:02.190]What's your strategy to avoiding the burnout
- [00:38:05.970]or dealing with it?
- [00:38:07.470]Oh, so I have what my friends have called buffering phase.
- [00:38:12.420]Um-hmm.
- [00:38:13.320]Where I have my handy-dandy notebook
- [00:38:17.070]and I'm not really processing, I am just recording.
- [00:38:22.650]And I'm kind of color-coding a bit as I'm recording
- [00:38:26.010]and on the way home or as I have a moment of downtime,
- [00:38:32.700]I'll go through my notes and think through
- [00:38:34.890]this is what I wanna come back to.
- [00:38:36.810]So I engage in that like shifting,
- [00:38:40.200]but I'm not as intellectually engaged,
- [00:38:44.490]as I'm kind of trying to take everything in.
- [00:38:46.950]It's not until after that I'm trying to figure out,
- [00:38:50.316]okay, the so what?
- [00:38:51.690]What is it about this experience,
- [00:38:55.230]this conference, that was important to me.
- [00:38:58.110]That I get to like sift through it
- [00:38:59.817]and make some more sense of it,
- [00:39:01.560]which has some pluses and negatives.
- [00:39:05.430]Like it helps with my endurance,
- [00:39:08.130]in terms of getting through the conference.
- [00:39:10.170]Versus like day one you're bright and fresh
- [00:39:13.830]and like day three you're like, can I go home now?
- [00:39:17.190]Yeah, yeah.
- [00:39:18.445]I can't do this anymore.
- [00:39:19.290]So it allows me to, by day four,
- [00:39:22.410]be like, okay, yeah, I got some stuff to think about.
- [00:39:26.730]So endurance is great.
- [00:39:28.350]And then it also gives me some stuff
- [00:39:30.570]to reconnect with presenters around?
- [00:39:34.613]Um-hmm.
- [00:39:35.446]Like, oh, hey, I was thinking about this in the airport.
- [00:39:38.490]Can you talk to me more about this?
- [00:39:40.050]So it's this way to continue that networking piece,
- [00:39:46.530]which is nice.
- [00:39:47.363]But that's kind of my strategy and it seems to work for me.
- [00:39:51.960]Yeah my strategy, as expected, is completely different-
- [00:39:57.472]Everything, everywhere,
- [00:39:58.563]all at once. And it's social.
- [00:39:59.396]No, it is social.
- [00:40:00.570]So I sit either with colleagues, usually the two
- [00:40:04.350]and this is what I learned on
- [00:40:06.625]my first conference at AERA in New Orleans.
- [00:40:09.870]And that is we had a dinner,
- [00:40:12.540]my mentor Bob Calfee had his students from all the years,
- [00:40:19.440]whoever showed up at AERA there was a dinner with Bob
- [00:40:23.190]and everybody else.
- [00:40:24.420]Bob was paying.
- [00:40:25.320]That was very good as a graduate student, right.
- [00:40:28.557](Nicholas chuckles)
- [00:40:29.700]But we got to meet and talk to others
- [00:40:34.380]and talk about the conference
- [00:40:35.580]and talk beyond the conference.
- [00:40:36.660]And obviously, talk and tell Bob stories
- [00:40:39.030]because that's required- Who doesn't love
- [00:40:40.470]Bob stories?
- [00:40:42.300]That is where it's at.
- [00:40:43.680]That is where I learned that my experiences with Bob
- [00:40:46.110]were not unique in any way, which was a relief,
- [00:40:50.250]but a story for another time.
- [00:40:52.950]Maybe when we talk about comprehensive exams
- [00:40:55.170]or whatever you're calling them in different institutions,
- [00:40:58.770]that will come up.
- [00:40:59.730]But what I've learned, and this is what I do,
- [00:41:02.490]I either sit with students
- [00:41:04.860]or people who were my colleagues at one point or another
- [00:41:07.380]and we know each other during lunch
- [00:41:09.450]or in the early afternoon and just debrief together.
- [00:41:13.350]What did you see that you thought,
- [00:41:15.300]because through talking to somebody else,
- [00:41:17.250]I start grasping with the idea
- [00:41:19.320]of what did I actually see that I care about
- [00:41:21.810]and that I'm going to roll with.
- [00:41:24.630]And the advantage of that social aspect
- [00:41:27.630]is you're hearing about what other people saw,
- [00:41:29.850]which may be very different,
- [00:41:31.110]which may actually be something you want to follow up on.
- [00:41:34.350]And if I have graduate students coming with me,
- [00:41:37.020]which I try to have as much as possible,
- [00:41:39.360]that's an opportunity because you're doing both things.
- [00:41:41.580]You're learning about what they've heard.
- [00:41:44.580]You're processing yourself,
- [00:41:45.930]but you're also teaching them how to process.
- [00:41:48.450]Which is, I think, an important thing
- [00:41:50.490]because you can go to a conference
- [00:41:51.930]and come back and not remember anything
- [00:41:54.000]if you're not intentional about it, right.
- [00:41:55.920]And then going back to is it worth it?
- [00:41:58.440]It's not worth it at that point.
- [00:41:59.940]Yeah, not if you're not able to
- [00:42:01.080]synthesize any of that, right?
- [00:42:02.580]Yeah.
- [00:42:03.413]And one of the things that I noticed in Dublin
- [00:42:06.870]that was happening is as people
- [00:42:09.330]are leveraging digital tools,
- [00:42:11.700]my organization had to change a bit, right?
- [00:42:15.701]Yeah.
- [00:42:16.534]So like one of the things
- [00:42:18.150]that I found myself doing there
- [00:42:19.500]is I relied less on my notebook and more on my Google Drive.
- [00:42:22.860]Like I would add,
- [00:42:24.030]people would- Sure.
- [00:42:25.590]Make their presentations available.
- [00:42:27.360]I'd add them to my Google Drive.
- [00:42:29.160]I'd have notes going alongside of that.
- [00:42:31.841]So that was really interesting.
- [00:42:33.900]It was a different way to be engaged in that conference
- [00:42:39.570]that I hadn't expected.
- [00:42:43.230]Yeah, and I think about the other benefit
- [00:42:46.350]that we've talked about and I want to just kind of,
- [00:42:49.050]why is it important to go to conferences?
- [00:42:52.020]I think that part of the publishing process,
- [00:42:54.270]it is really the critical element for me.
- [00:42:57.900]It pushes you to write and get something out there.
- [00:43:00.630]It gives you feedback on that something, whatever it may be.
- [00:43:04.350]It's an opportunity to go to sessions with editors
- [00:43:08.070]who talk about how to get published.
- [00:43:10.050]What are the most common mistakes.
- [00:43:11.670]What are the things that you should avoid and all of that.
- [00:43:13.980]There's always a session.
- [00:43:15.990]Go to them, especially as a young scholar,
- [00:43:18.180]you learn every time you listen,
- [00:43:20.490]something new, something different
- [00:43:22.650]and you also can have a conversation with an editor.
- [00:43:25.410]And I've seen a few editors,
- [00:43:26.670]especially in the big conferences,
- [00:43:27.990]actually walking through a poster session,
- [00:43:30.810]giving their cards and saying, "I like this.
- [00:43:34.050]When you finish the paper, I want you to submit it."
- [00:43:36.120]So you are getting a hook into the publication process
- [00:43:40.830]that can be highly supportive.
- [00:43:42.270]Ooh, and a callback.
- [00:43:43.967]Yeah.
- [00:43:44.850]Additionally, as you are establishing that network,
- [00:43:50.730]you're also thinking about within your tenure process,
- [00:43:54.600]if you're in a tenure track position,
- [00:43:57.120]people who can provide commentary
- [00:43:59.190]on your contributions to the field.
- [00:44:01.710]Yeah, that's very true.
- [00:44:02.994]So one of the pieces that you'll have to do
- [00:44:05.490]as you move from assistant to associate
- [00:44:08.610]is provide a list of people who are able to talk to
- [00:44:12.690]and about your larger contributions.
- [00:44:14.880]And a lot of the people that I supplied in my listings
- [00:44:19.320]were from people I met at conferences.
- [00:44:21.030]See! All the way back, look at me work!
- [00:44:23.940]All the way back,
- [00:44:25.151]to networking. Coffee, finally kicked in.
- [00:44:27.660]Okay.
- [00:44:29.103]To Assistant Associate.
- [00:44:29.936]Yes.
- [00:44:30.769]Yeah, see?
- [00:44:31.602]Now it looks like I planted that.
- [00:44:34.080]Edit this so it makes it look like I did that.
- [00:44:36.810]Make it look like I'm smart
- [00:44:38.610]and caffeinated when neither of those things were true
- [00:44:42.600]at that point in time.
- [00:44:44.760]Can that happen?
- [00:44:46.290]I don't know, please?
- [00:44:47.123]No, I'm getting a head shake, no.
- [00:44:49.290]No?
- [00:44:50.160]It's okay.
- [00:44:50.993]I'm fine with it. Whatever.
- [00:44:53.580]Life on YouTube.
- [00:44:56.190]All right, so. So conferences.
- [00:44:59.670]Conferences are fun,
- [00:45:00.900]but you have to be thoughtful about them.
- [00:45:02.520]Um-hmm, yeah, you have to be thoughtful
- [00:45:07.980]and sometimes a vacation's okay.
- [00:45:11.250]Yes.
- [00:45:12.083]Like COVID has been really helpful in getting,
- [00:45:18.630]for me, to think about where are the organizations
- [00:45:24.480]doing the work that I'm most interested in.
- [00:45:28.230]And if those organizations don't exist,
- [00:45:32.670]where do I find those conferences?
- [00:45:35.670]Those opportunities?
- [00:45:36.707]Where do I find, where do I find,
- [00:45:37.560]where do I find my people?
- [00:45:40.350]Versus you, you are just all over the place.
- [00:45:43.170]I am a little bit,
- [00:45:44.190]I'm always looking
- [00:45:45.720]and I think that's where I am in my career
- [00:45:49.080]and in my family life.
- [00:45:50.520]I mean we didn't mention the fact if you've got young kids,
- [00:45:54.510]some conferences will give support.
- [00:45:56.430]Travel is still expensive.
- [00:45:58.200]Right.
- [00:45:59.033]That made it that for a long time,
- [00:46:00.990]I was the king of the 48 hours at a conference,
- [00:46:04.050]including travel time.
- [00:46:05.610]That was special and now I take a little bit longer
- [00:46:09.930]and I'm enjoying it a lot more,
- [00:46:12.450]because in 48 hours you present twice
- [00:46:15.060]and then you interface with people once,
- [00:46:20.100]you have one lunch and you go to two presentations,
- [00:46:22.980]that's all you have.
- [00:46:24.180]I'm trying to figure out
- [00:46:25.013]something clever around promiscuous and conference going
- [00:46:28.410]and I'm not having any luck.
- [00:46:31.770]Maybe next time.
- [00:46:32.640]Maybe next time. Maybe next time.
- [00:46:37.770]So it feels like
- [00:46:38.670]we've covered some basics around conferences.
- [00:46:41.880]Which is good. Be thoughtful.
- [00:46:44.010]Ask for funding if it's there.
- [00:46:47.760]Think about scale and, ultimately, make it useful.
- [00:46:55.800]You should be able to pull that back into your work.
- [00:46:58.590]So, yeah.
- [00:47:01.380]What are we talking about next? Do you have any idea?
- [00:47:03.817]I have no idea.
- [00:47:04.650]So if you have suggestions.
- [00:47:06.270]Well, don't look at me. Look at them.
- [00:47:07.860]If you have suggestions.
- [00:47:10.320]Comment down below.
- [00:47:11.970]And I believe the young ones are saying, "Smash".
- [00:47:16.650]Smash?
- [00:47:17.520]Smash, that Like button. Okay, oh.
- [00:47:20.503]I don't know and Subscribe.
- [00:47:23.460]Like we're a magazine.
- [00:47:27.900]I don't know what's gonna work.
- [00:47:28.770]But yes, if you have ideas,
- [00:47:30.540]if you have things you want us to tackle,
- [00:47:32.970]either in this season of "Not That Kind of a Doctor"
- [00:47:35.910]or our next season, let us know,
- [00:47:39.030]'cause we're always working on ideas.
- [00:47:42.060]And we're not that kind of doctor.
- [00:47:44.010]We're not that kind of doctor.
- [00:47:46.020]Obviously (mumbling), I don't know.
- [00:47:48.900]So, all right, see you in the next one.
- [00:47:51.821](upbeat music)
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