Saturday, October 30, 2010

Advice to Academics: How to Select a Conference?

Choosing a conference where one will give a talk has become more fraught than ever. Nowadays, we are lucky if our university pays for one or two conferences per academic year. Often, academics have to shoulder out-of-pocket expenses to attend conferences. This is why I believe that the choice of where you will give your talk should be approached carefully.

Many young academics choose to speak at conferences that are dedicated to their research interests. I think this is a mistake. You don't want to end up with a CV showing that you kept doing the same thing for years. Nowadays, only a very broad range of research interests and teaching experiences will guarantee a comfortable career path for an academic in the Humanities.

When I choose a conference, I always select a panel that will discuss something I have never addressed, studied, or even considered before. In May, I gave a talk on the Spanish mystery novel. Next week, I will be speaking about the horror genre. It was weary work to get myself knowledgeable enough about these subjects since they lie so far away from my regular research interests (identity, ideology, female Bildungsroman, XIXth century Realism.) However, once I got over my initial resistance to these topics, I have discovered a very interesting tendency that the mystery novels and the horror novels share in contemporary Spanish literature. As a result, I will be able to combine the two conference talks into an article ready for publication with very little extra work.

Sometimes, you get so comfortable with your primary area of interest that it's hard to push yourself to explore other research interests. There are people who keep giving talks on the subject of their doctoral dissertation years after they got their PhD. I never wanted to turn into this sad staple of academic life, whose appearance at a conference is greeted by a fatigued sigh of "Here she goes again with her Bildungsroman obsession." Yesterday, I talked with an older colleague who is a very respected and productive scholar, and he told me that choosing a subject he has never worked on before for a conference talk has been his life-long - and very successful! - strategy.

I understand that this advice will not be useful to people in the sciences because the purpose of going to conferences is different from what it is for people in the Humanities. For my colleagues in the Humanities, though, this should be something to think about.

15 comments:

sarcozona said...

I'm glad you put in the caveat about the sciences because it would be all but impossible to collect data and present on something unrelated to what you normally do!

But I think your advice is still quite relevant. Conferences can be a great place to present project tangents - avenues you've explored a little, but don't have much solid work on - to get good feedback on whether it's worth further development and to find collaborators.

I've also found that conferences are a good place to play with different ways of framing research. What "story" is most interesting to other researchers? The plant physiology approach? The climate change aspects? The repercussions for species distribution models? For me, each framing has led to very different critiques and suggestions for the the same research. I think that my project has improved a great deal because of it.

Pagan Topologist said...

I go almost exclusively to conferences that I am invited to these days. This is one or two a year. I have not written a research proposal in years, since I came to believe in the 1980's that the process was beyond ethical bounds I was willing to involve myself in. I am fortunate that my field of reaseach requires only pen and paper and library access. But this means that I have to depend on the travel funding I can get from my university (nominally $1K/year,) the funding I can get from conferences, or my own personal funds. I do sometimes go to conferences where I am not giving a talk to keep up with what others in my field are doing. I am surprised that more people do not do this.

Clarissa said...

"I do sometimes go to conferences where I am not giving a talk to keep up with what others in my field are doing. I am surprised that more people do not do this."

-I've never heard of a university that would pay for something like that. Especially, nowadays.

Pagan Topologist said...

Indeed, my university does not pay for me to attend any conference unless I am invited and the conference does not provide full funding. When I attend a conference without presenting a talk, I pay for it myself.

Anonymous said...

"When I attend a conference without presenting a talk, I pay for it myself."

What the heck is this? I never go anywhere in the business world that is remotely business-related unless my company is paying every cent. That is deeply odd that your universities force you to pay your costs for attending conferences.

-Mike

Clarissa said...

I have to say that we have an amazing departmental Chair who goes to bat for us all the time, so we still get the university to pay for our conferences. At other universities, though, people have had their funding pulled completely. Still, going to conferences is their obligation, thay can't avoid it. So they have to pay to go. And it isn't just travel expenses. Registering for a conference costs anywhere betwee 200 and 400$, so you can imagine how difficult that is for many people.

Pagan Topologist said...

It is necessary to keep oneself in touch with ones professional community, even if sometimes it is out-of-pocket, Mike. I was thinking that it is a difference between commercial enterprise vs. working in an academic environment, but my wife, a director of nursing at a nursing home, pays her own way to the National Directors of Nursing Association Conference so she can keep up with the best practices in the industry. Her employer won't pay for it. She has always taken vacation time to attend it, too, but she has decided to see if she can get administrative leave to attend in 2011.

I am lucky in that conferences in topology rarely have registratiion fees exceeding $100. The last one I attended, last month, was 1000 Mexican Pesos, which was about $80 US. American Math Society meetings are more expensive, but I attend these only once every few years.

Clarissa said...

When I'm a full professor, I will definitely go to any conference I want and persecute eveyrbody with uncomfortable questions. That will be fun!! :-)

Pagan Topologist said...

It is also fun to see if you can inspire graduate students from around the world, Clarissa. I seem to be getting better and better at that! It is a big part of why I attend conferences.

Clarissa said...

You mean show the grad students that one can be an academic and still be happy (unlike what they show in that video I posted this week)? That would be great! Because anti-academic mythology abounds.

Pagan Topologist said...

That is part of it, but I also suggest topics they might like to work on research wise. It may be different in mathematics, but people who tell others about unsolved problems that they might want to work on, as I do, are quite popular.

In another vein, I have often wished an anthropologist would study topologists at conferences. We seem to have a lot more sense of community and a lot less angry rivalry than people in many academic fields seem to.

Clarissa said...

That's interesting. In my field, the levels of aggression at conferences are often through the roof. I've had a much older and esteemed colleague throw small objects in my direction because he didn't like my conference talk. :-)

Anonymous said...

Well, to be fair, most of the technical certifications I have, I paid for out of pocket.

That's roughly comparable, I think, to having to pay to attend conferences in your field.

Luckily, the company I work for now is very generous and pays for training, certifications, conferences, and anything work-related at all.


-Mike

DM said...

@Mike: An academic is a bit like the CEO of a micro-company (his/her graduate students, post-docs etc.). He or she manages his budget. If he has grant money, he has travel money. If he hasn't...

Clarissa said...

DM: not necessarily. I'm in the Humanities, so I don't have grants. But I do have travel money. I also don't have post-docs and do not supervise grad students. There is no "budget" for me to manage. You are talking about a very specific kind of academics, which do exist, but do not represent the majority.