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.

Laura Malisheski’s article highlights the problem that if you are desperate for a job, you will take anything that’s offered even though it might not be ideal for you. Who’s going to turn something secure down after years of living near the poverty line as a student and part-time teacher? You could very possibly end up taking a job where the teaching load is too heavy to do any research, or where you have to move hundreds of miles from friends and family. But despair will set in especially if you are looking for work for this coming academic year and, as the saying goes, ‘beggars can’t be choosers’. Malisheski claims that you will spot many of the key warning signs at interview, so make sure you keep alert for signs of internal tension within the department for example.

Realistically though, people rarely turn down job offers. Last week a friend of mine whose first book has just been published went for a job in a city where he didn’t want to live. He really didn’t want to relocate there, but would have done so in order to get a secure position and was rather disappointed to find that he hadn’t got the job. However, this coming week he has an interview in a much more desirable location, with other more encouraging opportunities in the pipeline. More concerning is when there seem to be no jobs at all coming up in your field, or you are applying for hundreds of positions and not getting any interviews at all.

Malisheski argues that it could take several years to find your feet at an institution that you love. Not everyone wants to stay in their first permanent job anyway, having all sorts of reasons for moving. So if you can bear another few years of instability it’s worth taking a job that may not be perfect in order to simply get on that career ladder. And to all those people looking for work for September…good luck!

We had a long discussion about academic CVs and the perils of getting CV advice from generic websites targeted at those who are entering the commercial sector. Many of these advice sites say that a CV should be no more than 2 pages. Well, even for academics at the start of their careers it is impossible to fit everything in to 2 pages. We decided that a good length for an academic CV was between 4-6 pages. But the question was raised about how to make different sections of your CV stand out and be more attractive to the reader. The use of colour was proposed, which I think is a great idea. BUT what if the person printing out your CV at the other end hasn’t got a colour printer? Or if the CV is distributed for the interview panel using only a black and white photocopier? All that hard work choosing colours will have been for nothing. Messing about with italics, underlining and different fonts is also not recommended as it makes the CV harder to read. The solutions we came up with were using different point sizes and spacing the words well on the page.

Another question was about the issue of salary negotiations. Rarely, an interview panel will ask you what level of salary you would expect if you got the post. What a challenging question! You don’t want to price yourself out of the market but equally you don’t want to under-sell yourself. Obviously any answer given in an interview is not binding: if you are offered the job you will be able to negotiate formally later. But it’s still a difficult one; I’d be interested to hear anyone’s suggestions on how to handle that.

Overall I had a great time in Southampton, a lovely setting and a very friendly, enthusiastic bunch of students. I could quite get used to this roving careers adviser lark! So if you have a group you’d like me to come and talk to…please get in touch!