How to Overcome Fear and Loathing on the Academic Conference Trail: Practical Tips for Beginners (1993)

The graduate students were sitting on ground, wreathed around my feet, looking up, earnest with anticipation. Share with us, one pleaded, the fruits of your experience and wisdom. Tell us how you submitted one paper to 18 conferences, using a different title each time. Again? I queried. Again, they chanted in unison.(1) FOR OVER-THE-HILL, TENURED PILLARS OF THE ESTABLISHMENT, LIKE MYSELF, YOU can be very picky about which conference to attend and nobody cares if you don't show up. Anything in Hawaii, Montreal, New Orleans, Paris, London, or Venice -- preferably out of season -- sounds good to me, especially if expenses are paid and there's promise of unlimited opportunities to tell my war stories about what it was really like at Berkeley in 1960s. But for a budding academic -- in grad school or a junior Prof. -- who wants to survive long, tense years of apprenticeship and enter hallowed guild of professordom, trips to annual conferences organized by professional association of your discipline are obligatory. And you'll more likely end up in a mega-hotel complex in Riverside than in a comfortable B and B on Riviera. build your survival skills, enabling you to hone your capacity for self-referentiality and no-holds-barred groveling, and, more importantly, to know when each should be appropriately displayed. And, as a bonus, they provide an opportunity to pad your resume -- by entering one item under Conferences Attended and another under Unpublished Papers. If you want a job or to keep one you have, you must make pilgrimage and sign up for everything -- intimate receptions attended by thousands, workshops with eminent graybeards, awards banquet, even bus tours of local sites of historical interest. And don't ignore hotel sauna. Each site offers opportunity for newcomers to network and to learn honored rituals of self-abasement so beloved in academia. On paper, I admit, it doesn't look easy. You need to find a conference within your discipline and budget, then submit a suitably scholarly and original essay in appropriate form and before next week's deadline. You are told that your proposal will be reviewed by a board of distinguished experts who know everything there is to know and much more about your subject. If your puny piece is by some good fortune accepted by powers-that-be, then you must find a large piece of small change to cover privilege of attending a once-in-a-lifetime event with some of best minds of your generation. And if you make it to a Hyatt in Kansas City, Missouri, or a Hilton in Anaheim, then you need a huge reservoir of social graces to make it through week. It seems daunting, I know. But not to worry. Just learn from my experience and you'll be envy of your peers and quickly on your way up ladder toward that coveted tenured job at an exclusive, ivied college that pays you large sums of money to think and, occasionally, to share those thoughts with a very small seminar of deeply intelligent but respectful grad students who sit wreathed at your feet, fingers pecking away at their noiseless laptops. Be Prepared First, go down to your local office supply store and invest 75 cents in a plastic badge holder. Then burrow around in a second-hand shop until you find some glossy ribbon, a relic of a Rotarians' or Elks' gathering, preferably embossed with impressive language of officialdom, such as Second Vice-President or Honorary Program Chair. Store safely for later use (see, ahead, Dress to Code, Cutting Costs, A Night on Town). Second, spend a few minutes every day for a week practicing eye exercises, especially rapid lateral and vertical movements. Techniques of Submission To get your name (and your resume) into program, you need to get a paper accepted. Don't be intimidated by promotional hype about how discriminating organizers are and how they accept only papers that represent la creme de la creme. …