Academic Conferences...

I've been meaning to write for a week or so on the topic of the academic conference. Last weekend, I attended an academic conference. It was a two-day event. I thought I would take a few minutes to describe such an event in an effort at helping students to understand my life as a professor a bit more fully.

At each college or university, professors are responsible for at least three different kinds of activities:

Scholarly work (research)
Service (in the form of commitee work, advising, department work, etc.)
Teaching

At some schools, the order (in terms of priority) goes:

Scholarly Work
Teaching
Service

At other schools the order (in terms of priority) goes:

Teaching
Service
Scholarly Work

Students usually have very little sense that their professors are engaged in work beyond just teaching. Teaching is the most visible kind of work students see professors doing, so they assume it's all that professors do.

The truth is, as I've tried to sketch out above, professors are busy with all kinds of work, only one of which is teaching.

So, what is this "scholarly work" piece? Research? What is that?

Students don't tend to think as universities as places where research is done and knowledge is created (again, they tend to think of them as places where young people are taught), but research is a big part of what some, and certainly not all, colleges and universities do. For many professors, whether or not they will receive tenure (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenure) will be determined by the amount of their "scholarly output"--that is, how many articles (in peer-reviewed journals), books, and conference presentations they create, deliver and/or publish.

The conference I attended was at a large research university in the northeast. It began late on a Friday afternoon. The way the conference is set up, there are large-group "sessions" where everyone at the conference can come and listen to one speaker, and then there are "break-out" sessions. During "break-out" sessions, you can look at the program and there are a whole bunch of different smaller sessions that you can attend. The purpose of the conference, in large-group sessions and break-out sessions, is to share one's work, one's research, with one's peers. The conference I attended began late on a Friday afternoon and wrapped up late the next day, a Saturday afternoon.

On Saturday morning, I presented my research in a break-out session. My session was attended by 5 colleagues--two friends and former graduate students at the school where I graduated from; my "advisor" from Iowa, where I earned by Masters degree, and two community college teachers from the local area. Five attendees is not great, but it's not awful either, especially given my topic. If you make a name for yourself in your field or do some really interesting or "sexy" work, more people will come to your sessions and, eventually, you will be asked to speak at one of the "large group" sessions. I'm not there yet (nor will I ever be...although who knows).

So, I gave my presentation on Saturday morning to this small group of colleagues/friends. It was a supportive crowd. Usually, such presentations last around 15-20 min. and then there's time for discussion. But, since the other person who was supposed to present his work after mine cancelled at the last minute, I had the full hour to myself to present and have discussion. And it went really well. I've been doing this now for about four years and the presentation I gave last week was, by far, the best presentation I have given so far.

One of the shocking things about these conferences is that many, many people who attend them and present their work just read from a paper they've written or prepared for the conference. This is INCREDIBLY tedious and can really bore the living daylights out of you. Still, the first few times i have presented I read papers, myself. In some ways, I think this is sort of natural--I'm new to the whole thing or was new, and so I just did what I saw a lot of other people doing. But to read a paper on a dry topic for 15-20 minutes can be a real sleeper for the people in the room. So, I've been moving towards Powerpoint Presentations, which make things much more interactive and much more interesting, I think.

And not only am I moving towards Powerpoint, but I am increasingly moving towards a model of presenting that I have seen a few others do where you use the session not to "present" on something you've already learned or discovered, but, instead, as an opportunity to "work through" some "problem" with your research. In my own case, this past weekend, I shared some of my data and then closed with two questions which I hoped would prompt some discussion. So, I'm not totally into the "working through problems" phase yet. But I'm moving in that direction, for sure. I just think it's more interesting for the audience, to be a part of it--not to receive the presentation, but to make it with the speaker. I've seen a few people do this well, and I've seen a few people just sort of bumble through presentations and the audience is just totally lost. I do think that nowhere else in our society do people just get up and read to an audience for 20 minutes or dense, academic material, so, that model really should probably go by the wayside at academic conferences as well. Better to get people involved and get them talking.

What good is all this? Well, I put this presentation on my CV (which stands for curriculum vitae, which is what professors have, a more elaborated form of resume) and this will, hopefully, assist me in my process of trying to get tenure. More immediately, the conference presentation allows you an audience for your work and your writing and, at least in my case, a chance to get feedback and in this way, it's incredibly useful.

Why do people go to these conferences, in general (not everyone who goes to the conference is there to present)? Well, professional development would be one reason. I think going to such conferences gives you an opportunity to hear what your peers are up to and this is incredibly valuable. But the best conference is an inspiration. YOu come away from it with lots of notes on things you want to look into or try. You feel a sense of renewal, as though you are ready to return to the classroom with new ideas. You also have the opportunity to catch up with old colleagues and here how they are doing. There are dinners and drinks, usually. The conference is as much a social event as it is an academic event.

I'm going to end here. I don't know how interesting this has been, if it has been interesting at all...