Prepare for Surprises

Way last fall, I was deeply involved in writing a paper for a philosophy conference. Just so you know, here's what I learned from the experience:

Some graduate students and professors, while delighted to be invited, and excited to include their academic papers in their CVs, don't actually prepare for these events at all.

In a word, my colleagues from SMU and I were the oddballs at the conference. We wore business attire, we had PowerPoint displays, we had rehearsed, we had edited our papers and prepared thumb drive copies for anyone who wanted to read the final drafts , we were on time, we checked the equipment before we started, we hadn't slept the night before . . . We were total philosophy nerds with a side order of Microsofty.

Our peers stood at the podiums and shuffled through preliminary drafts of their papers, reading occasional paragraphs, sifted through a few more pages, read something else that sounded a little random, and said things like, "Oh, I forgot to read you this part back here."

Academic conferences may differ by discipline. English conferences, say those sponsored by the Modern Language Association, may be a lot different, and I'm certain engineering conferences are so buttoned down that they squeak, organizationally speaking. There is a middle path, though, and the next time I do another academic conference, I will do a lot of the same preparation that I did for this one. However, I'll also do some things I didn't do before this one:

• Check out the sponsoring organization's culture by looking at photos of previous conferences. If I'd known that professors were presenting in Pendleton shirts, I might have left the suit and heels at home.


• Be fully prepared with all the electronic presentation tools, but be ready to work without them. Not every academic conference is the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, and not every presentation is in a big auditorium, so you need to be ready to scale it back for more intimate settings.


• Carry a business card with your email address on it, and maybe the URL for your blog. Yes, there's an app for that, but not everyone carries that kind of phone.


• Check out local restaurants in advance online: Indian, Chinese, and Thai food trump the usual college cafeteria or banquet fare most of the time, and you can have better conversations in small groups than you can at a huge table if you meet any interesting conferees.

So, if you go back to school and you get invited to present at a conference, square your shoulders and your paper, and keep your eyes open -- it's another learning opportunity.