To con-fer

I spent the last two days - very LONG days actually - at a grad conference.

About halfway through the first day, I found myself thinking "I've been to so many conferences already... why have I never been to a grad conference?... this stuff is great!"

It might help that it was held at my alma mater, so I knew some of the profs who stopped in, and I actually got the chance to chat with my MA advisor, who I haven't seen for years because she was on sabbatical and then on another leave, so she hasn't been as active in the department in the last little while. She didn't recognize me at first, but then when she did, she was very generous and kind, asking about my program now and inviting me to come by and chat with her about my current projects, which I'm certainly going to take her up on! (this despite the fact that my dissertation is no longer anywhere near her area of expertise!)

I also got an offer from one of the organizers to forward their 'to do' list to help us with our grad conference we're organizing for next month, which will also be a huge help with our own efforts to get this thing going.

But that wasn't the best part of it.

The best part was the students and the presentations. There were some really exciting papers, and the only one that I found really difficult to follow (and thus not terribly interesting) was the one in French. My French isn't good enought to have gotten more than the most rudimentary sense of what the paper was about. If I'd been able to read it, perhaps I would've gotten more, but my mastery of the spoken language is minimal, so I didn't get much out of it.

There was a woman presenting on the novel - Never Let me Go - that I'm presenting on next month at another grad conference, so I was really interested in her talk. Her title hadn't given any hint about what she was talking about, but I recognized the epigraph she began with right away, making me perk up at the end of a long day... Her approach is of course different than the argument that I'm making in the paper I'm presenting, but since I'm also going to be writing about the same novel in the dissertation - which is the whole reason for a dry-run discussion of it at a conference - I'm going to check out the theory she used to see whether it might also suit my purposes.

That was probably the only presentation that intersected with my own research interests, but there were many other presentations that I found fascinating as well, including one from another former MA student now returning as a doctoral student. We did recognize each other, but he was in the creative writing program and I in the literature program, so we'd never been in the same classes, but it was neat to hear what another graduate of the program was doing.

And the best part was the Q&A period. See, at most conferences I've been to, even the most collegial of ones always run the risk that the questions from the audience will not be true questions, but some pompous academic taking the opportunity to spout on about their own research. Those kinds of questions get really boring, both for the other audience members as well as the presenter; and they take up time that others who might have genuine inquiries could be using to ask those questions.

Even my paper went over quite well. Considering I was the very last person on the program, ending my talk only moments before the promise of free pizza in the campus pub (on St. Paddy's day on top of that), I actually got several questions and comments, and the back and forth that the discussion generated seemed to result for a genuine engagement with the paper. It was a very positive experience! Certainly much better than my second conference experience where the only question I got after my presentation was along the lines of "Are you related to so-and-so? Because I'm looking for my sister who was adopted a birth and I was hoping you were her" Huh? How is that a question worthy of the Q&A after a presentation? Ugh!

But that was another story. Yesterday's presentation went very well, and I was immensely pleased! Now all I'm hoping is that the conference we're holding next month will come off even half as well...