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.

Up to No Good

While the rest of the world has been deeply involved in the Congressional elections, Dancing with the Stars, and perfecting beer bong techniques, I've been preoccupied with much less momentous activities. Next week, I get to present a research paper at an academic conference. This shouldn't be a big deal for someone who talked on the air to hundreds of thousands of people at a time for decades, but it is. I am having the most horrific case of stage fright.

Anyway, the preparations for all this have eaten up every spare moment, including the time I would ordinarily spend blogging, eating meals at home, and, uh, housecleaning. Yes, the dust bunnies are back, and they are considering forming a barricade around the vacuum cleaner.

Meanwhile, the semester has reached the point where everyone on campus appears to be going through early-onset middle age. We have about a month of classes left before finals, and all the students are beginning to realize just how much work they need to complete in the next three weeks. This is also the time in the semester when the younger students begin to have emotional crises: broken hearts and hurt feelings abound just when so many people are tired out, anxious, and overwhelmed by their schedules.

The only way out is forward, both for the younger students and for me. We all need to get some sleep. Then, tomorrow morning, I'll clean up my study area, sort out all the papers and scripts for the conference, and start on the final write-through of the presentation script, the first draft of a paper for a panel discussion, and the creation of a new PowerPoint presentation on objectification. Oh, and a critical bibliography with its own PowerPoint slide. Then I get to start on the routine homework, including a paper on a bizarre poem by Robert Browning.

This is all going to seem so easy a year from now. And so worth it.