Academic conferences are as much about learning a new culture as they are about presenting your research ideas and networking for prospective career openings.

As a PhD candidate going to academic conferences in the United States for the first time, I was wary of where I present my paper and the kind of people who are likely to be there. A big conference is likely to put me in a situation where I will be a small fish in a very big pond while a smaller conference, yes, you guess it, will make me a small fish in a very small pond. On the one hand, stories abound of PhD students and senior academics casting covert looks at name tags only to discover that they have been wasting their time talking to a “nobody.” And on the other hand, I’ve heard stories of ‘newbies’ getting job interviews at big conferences and I know that a lot of PhDs will be coming to these big conferences ready to ‘fight’ each other for a job. I badly need a job but I wasn’t really willing to fight a thousand PhDs for one postdoc opening, which I might not even get!

In addition, I’m not sure if I do like academic conferences, except for the ones where I’m presenting a paper. I know that these gatherings can prove invaluable to my current research but lets be honest, a lot of academic presentations are boring, very boring. And you are likely to have meaningless chats with people you may never see again or hear some ‘strange’ guy talk about his dog. Okay, the last bit only happened to me once. But lets face it; conferences can turn out to be like one of those weird house parties you used to go to as an undergraduate student and you may come back from conferences not quite sure of what (substantively) you’ve got out of them.

With this philosophy dominating my thought in early April as I board the Virgin Atlantic flight to New York, and with very little money to spend criss-crossing the massive land space that is America, I decided to forgo a conference on American Popular Culture where 3,000 academics will be congregating, for a rather cosy graduate conference at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

The journey to Albuquerque from Birmingham, UK, took almost fourteen four hours with three different flights and stopovers in three cities. Will I like my hosts? Will I be spending four boring days in a city I have never been before?

Albuquerque turned out to be a great small city, ethnically diverse and with many cheap places to eat good New Mexican foods. I made use of my spare time by learning the city’s history and seeing the way the people live. The conference itself turned out to be the best conference I’ve been to yet. My hosts were great and they took time to show me the city and the university. While some European academics may think Americans are loud, self-involved folks, I found them to be respectful, funny and outgoing. Unlike some academic conferences I’ve been to in Europe, the academics I met were not pretentious.

As I left New Mexico for a holiday in Florida and New York, I felt like I made the right decision to go to a smaller conference. I didn’t leave with a job interview but I made some great friends, with whom I’m likely to be friends and colleagues for years to come.

Maybe next year I’ll go to a big conference, but for now, I’m happy being the little guy in the little league.

Shola Adenekan is a PhD candidate and a teaching-assistant at the University of Birmingham.

It is surprising how many seasoned academics are poor public speakers. I am not trying to claim to be the world’s best orator, but I certainly try to make my presentations pleasurable to listen to as well as informative. The main pitfalls are: poor volume, too much speed, lack of eye contact and poor use of visual material.

Volume: do not rely on having microphones that will work, learn how to project your voice yourself. You should be able to lecture to a room full of c. 100 people without a microphone easily, the same goes for conference presentations. Nerves can make us speak quietly, so concentrate on maintaining an even but clear volume.

Speed: if you speak to fast you will lose your audience almost immediately. It takes listeners’ brains a second or two to catch up with what you have said. Allow pauses at the end of your sentences and speak much slower that you would do in standard speech.

Eye contact: many people read conference papers from a full script (i.e. every word written out, not merely a series of notes). However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t maintain eye contact with your audience. This is partly connected to pace: don’t speak so fast and allow time to raise your eyes from the page and engage your listeners.

Visual material: audiences appreciate illustrative material on slides, OHPs or powerpoint, but then remember not to turn your back on your audience by talking to the screen! You don’t need to look at your image: you need to look at your audience.

These are very simple tips and will not affect the content of your talk, but they will certainly improve your audience understanding and appreciation of your efforts.

Universities are increasingly loathe to pay out huge amounts for conference attendance, so a big variable has to be cost. Is this a conference that represents good value for money? Do you get activities, interesting papers and free food packed in to your few days, or are you paying for the privilege of simply saying you have attended?

Another issue is the importance of the conference to your field. In the US there are several huge conferences in History with thousands of delegates at each. It is good to go to those occasionally, even if only to remind yourself why you prefer smaller, friendlier conferences!

‘Ms Mentor’: advice columnist on the Chronicle suggests that ‘prestige and visibility’ are two important criteria for conferences. Will you be able to expose your ideas to key movers and shakers in the field? Is the conference attached to or funded by important bodies in your area?

And finally, there are always the non-academic considerations: is the conference held somewhere you have always wanted to visit and does the programme allow time to explore? Is it easy to take a spouse and family with you if you want to?

I’m off to Plymouth this week to a conference on Transatlantic Exchanges: enjoy your conference trips, wherever you end up!

You would imagine someone who lectures and leads seminars for a living would have no qualms about presenting a conference paper to a select gathering of interested colleagues but it is surprising how many academics do struggle with their public speaking techniques. And this has an impact not only at the conference or in the classroom, but also in the job market too, because being able to project yourself well orally is the key to interview success.

So, what are the pitfalls of conference papers (and interview presentations)? Going over the length of time you have been assigned shows disorganisation and arrogance. It shouldn’t be done, full stop! Yes, this may mean the tedious process of reading through your speech while timing yourself, and then pruning it accordingly, but believe me, you’d rather spend time doing that now than when you’re on the podium in front of a sea of faces.

The other main issues, and they are connected, are speed and volume of your speech. It is possible to speak too slowly, but far more people speak too quickly, either through nerves or having too much material (see the paragraph above!). Listeners simply cannot follow your train of thought if you rush through your paper.

The most difficult aspect for listeners is when someone speaks too quietly and is unable to project their voice. It is worth developing the skill of speaking to fill the size of a room without a microphone as you never know when the technology will fail.  This all sounds blatantly obvious, but many seasoned academics get this wrong, so if you can excel at this, you are half way to delivering a successful presentation.

Certainly back when I was an undergraduate a seminar was very occasionally written off by the tutor because not enough of us had shown up. This was a treat for us students as we had an extra hour to mess around rather than have to think seriously!

There was also the odd occasion where we were there in the classroom but our tutor wasn’t: usually for reasons of illness but I do remember one time when a lecturer had gone off to a conference and forgotten to get anyone to cover his classes for him. So, the odd lapse on the side of the teacher is also common.

A blogpost in Chronicle this week debates the issue of academic non-attendance at conferences and asks whether this is a rising trend in light of the financial cutbacks. Commentators on the post claimed that there have always been a small percentage of ‘no-shows’ at conferences and anyway, some of these large meetings are of limited scholarly worth. That can be the topic of another blog entry in the future!

I wanted to use these examples to highlight the problem of non-attendance among students and academics. While either party missing one session is hardly earth-shattering, it does show a general lack of respect for a commitment entered into. One of the largest complaints by students on the NSS (National Student Survey) is that their lecturers turn up late or not at all. And it is very annoying for lecturers to turn up and find that no students have bothered to attend. So, barring illness, if we say we’re going to do something, let’s all try to do it and build up the respect between staff and student again.

Business cards:

One thing I haven’t got round to doing yet is having my business cards made up. This is vital for conference attendees who are actively looking for a new job (or their first job). It looks really professional and is a good way of firming up a networking opportunity. People in the private sector have known this for years, but many academics are still missing this trick.

What sort of networking?

So, why could a conference be useful to you? As a jobseeker it’s a chance to let as many people as possible know that you are looking for work. I know it sounds desperate, but you never know: you might speak to someone who really needs someone to come and do some teaching at their institution. Don’t shy away from talking to the more senior scholars. They are usually very approachable and friendly.

You also might meet people who are journal editors or readers for big publishing houses. They might come across your work and if you have impressed them at a conference then they’re more likely to give you a chance.

Another sort of connection will be someone you could collaborate with, whose interests are close to yours and who might like to write a joint article or even work on a book together.

Academic reputation:

Perhaps more important than all of these is the opportunity to share your research with your peers and in doing so you enhance your own reputation and that of your institution. So, make sure you present a good paper, keep to time and know your stuff! And then there’s all the enjoyable social activities that conferences do present, you are allowed to have some fun too!

The thing about American conferences is that they are pretty intense: they start early in the morning (8.30am!) and pack in as many speakers as possible, not finishing till 5 or 6 in the evening. Americans seem to have really got the hang of this networking lark too, with junior scholars spending much of the conference queuing up to discuss their work with more senior members of the profession.

One thing on everyone’s mind, apart from the study of history of course, was the decrease in funding available for conference attendance and this was a story shared by delegates from all countries, the US, the UK and Japan to name but a few. Many colleagues from the US have been used to having everything paid for when they go to conferences, right down to the last taxi, alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks and every meal. Now budgets are being limited and while many universities are still contributing to their staff’s conference attendance, this is not the free for all that it once was. Several contributors had to drop out of the conference at the last minute because their funding was cut, and I, too, would have been unable to afford to go to Seattle had I not received funding from my university and the British Academy.

Those people who are not academics sometimes can’t quite work out the purpose of conference attendance and become rather jealous or cross at stories of us going away on glorified all-expenses paid holidays. But conference attending is an important part of the job; not only for career building and personal development, but also for representing your institution abroad and creating an international research culture that our government so values when it comes to doling out its money. On a personal level you can get a lot of exposure for your research and perhaps make connections that will help you get published or get work in the future. So let’s hope that universities don’t cut their staff travel budgets too far and that conference attendance will be part of an academic’s job for a long time to come.

senior academics networked with: 50

future job opportunities gained: who knows?

5pm
Am now home after a long day spent at a conference where I made sure that several experts in my field learned about my research and what a likeable young scholar I am! I have got at least one job in the past because of networking during conference coffee-breaks, so it’s an unpaid job (reviews’ editor of a small journal) but I enjoy it, and it looks great on my CV.

There are two other good things about conferences; first you get lots of experience at public speaking. Yes, the first few times you stand up in front of a room full of people the natural impulse is to run out of the room screaming, but after two or three goes you’ll actually start to find it enjoyable.

Second, you can’t beat conferences for the opportunity to expose your original research to a room full of experts. You’ll get some useful feedback and maybe even the opportunity to publish your paper: another thing that’s great for the CV.

Comment on this diary below:

For example: What’s your best and worst conference experience? Have you got any networking tips that might help the shy jobseeker?