Going To Your First Conference
Chris reflects on going to his first conference with sage advice for all PGRs.
Chris’s first presentation on ‘The White People’, Arthur Machen. Ebookarama editions.
I gave my first conference paper in August 2016 and it was terrifying!
I was a Masters student and didn’t for one second really believe that I had the right to a voice within the academic community. I was presenting at a conference slightly outside of my research area; I study Fantasy literature, and this was a conference on the Gothic.
I had been supported by the Research Support Award, and should have been confident, but everything about the experience was anxiety-inducing: getting a train to Guildford, a town I’d never been to before and where I would surely become hopelessly lost, showing up to a new room in a new building, where I would inevitably knock over trays of coffee, and finally standing up and speaking to a room full of strangers, all of whom would have years of experience mastering the eldritch mysteries of the Gothic, who, having tired of cackling at my ineptitude, would jeer me from the stage!
Needless to say, of course, it really went quite well.
In the intervening years I’ve had a chance to reflect on my first conference experience, and now feel well placed to over some guidance to any student who is yet to take the plunge…
Before You Go
Submitting An Abstract
It all starts with the abstract. I would always recommend having your supervisor or a trusted member of staff look over your abstract, and with plenty of time to make changes before the Call for Papers (CfP) deadline.
The three crucial qualities to an abstract are that it:
clearly establishes your argument
provides a critical context for your argument
is related to the conference itself.
My own structure tends to be basic but clear: what is the current critical context around this author/subject/text and why is what I’m going to present different from/a development of this critical context.
Prepare For Tech Issues
When preparing to travel to your first conference, I would advise having two separate memory sticks which both contain your PowerPoint presentation, assuming you’re using one. I’ve had at least one memory stick fail on me! I would also make sure you have your PowerPoint and presentation saved to Dropbox or OneDrive. That way, if all else fails, you can use the computer in the room you are presenting in to log into Dropbox and bring up your slides/paper that way! Due to the aforementioned memory stick issues, I’ve had to do this more than once.
On the Day
So you’ve arrived! You didn’t get lost, you found the right room, filled out your registration form and snagged a coffee after first working out what button to press on the infernal coffee-making contraption. The temptation can be to hide in a corner not making eye contact until it’s your turn to present. I would urge you to fight this impulse, if at all possible. It really helps to chat to someone early on the first day. If this is also the day you are presenting, it’s especially helpful: you really don’t want the first time you speak that day to be addressing a lecture hall full of strangers!
Remember to Talk
On this particular day, I got chatting to a fellow presenter before the conference got started and it really helped set the tone for me. Not only was she a Masters student like myself (not everyone there will be a Professor, in fact many will be Early Career Researchers (ECRs)), but we quickly discovered that she was the first presenter of the conference, and I was the second. Discussing things afterward, we both agreed that chatting first helped take our mind off of our nerves, got our voices warmed up, and made us feel like at least one person in the audience was definitely on our side.
Throughout the conference itself, I also found so many of my fears were allayed. There was a good spread of experience in terms of attendees: from first timers to conference veterans and experienced lecturers. Just about anyone who had an interest in the Gothic! I felt my paper went quite well, although it was a real relief to get it over with. Presenting slides visually to an audience for the first time particularly brought home to me how crucial it was that I wasn’t just reading an essay out loud. For instance, the author I was presenting on wrote without paragraph breaks in order to discomfort the reader; it was therefore really helpful to be able to show the audience page after page of walls of text to illustrate my point.
During the Q&A section after my panel, however, I didn’t receive many questions from the audience. Inevitably I fell to doubt! Please don’t feel discouraged if this happens to you. This often occurs because the attendees are taking their time to digest your arguments. You’ll so often find that it is during lunch or post-conference drinks that people begin to really chat to you about your work. Rather than quizzing you in front of an audience, this is often more comfortable for both you and your fellow attendees.
After
If possible, stay in touch with people! Networking can seem such a cynical term, but it really helps to have contacts outside of your own University peer group. Years later, I’ve stayed in touch with the attendee I chatted to on that first day. We’ve bumped into each other at conferences and cast an eye over each other’s papers by email. Especially at an interdisciplinary conference such as my first one, you’ll meet researchers in different but connected fields. This gives you a chance to stay in touch with people with different ideas and perspectives than you, and can only help your future work!
Ask Questions
Don’t be afraid to ask questions if you are unsure. Just for example, before for this first conference I was asked by the organisers to formally write up my paper for the conference publication. The snag was I was asked to do so in a ‘creative non-fiction’ style. I had no idea what this meant and Googling it didn’t really help! In my uncertainty, I didn’t produce my best work, and my paper ended up having to be heavily edited. I don’t regret this experience, but on reflection I would have asked for some clarification of what the editors were looking for, and possibly even examples of the ‘creative non-fiction’ style for guidance.
Looking Back
I’ve been to many conferences since, but I had to get this first one under my belt. I’m really glad I took a chance by attending and presenting at a conference not only so early in my research career, but in an unfamiliar place. Despite all my worries, I only ever felt welcomed by more experienced attendees. If you haven’t yet presented at a conference, my advice is to go somewhere unfamiliar, chat to new people in different fields, and enjoy the feeling of being a real member of the academic community. Take the plunge!
Chris Lynch Becherer is sixth year (part-time) PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow, studying the development of world building in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. He also co-runs Puck's Players, a fantasy theatre group! Connect with him: c.lynch.2@research,gla.ac.uk and @hopefullmirrlees on Twitter.
