Since the conference season is well upon us, many of us are attending them in person and have been posting pictures with clients/colleagues whom we haven’t met in some time while also sharing some learning(s) and notes from the sessions we have attended.
After taking a long(-ish) break from conferencing, I attended my first 2024 conference in early February. Honestly, I was both excited and anxious for obvious reasons.
Besides being excited about the conference’s proceedings, meeting with our clients, having a meal, and sharing our work, I spent some time at the poster session scheduled during the evening of the 2-day event and interacted with a few graduate students to learn more about their research.
Here’s a short story but a sweet and long memory.
In 2008, when I was “dissertating” and had my defense date set for late summer, I had an opportunity to present my work data findings in a student poster at a large education research and evaluation conference in New York.
I was nervous. No, I was sweating bullets.
Conferences (small/large) can be great spaces for networking and learning while also a bit intimidating, especially for grad students who may be presenting their work for the first time and are expected to know a lot (if not everything) about their work (either at a session/on a poster) and be able to articulate well if asked about it.
I stood quietly beside my poster for most of the time (~40 minutes). Sometimes, I made direct eye contact, nodded, or even managed a smile at the passersby and a few of them reciprocated. But, most of the attendees just passed by my poster board.
Towards the end when I was about to remove the board pins off of my poster to wrap it up and head out, two professors stopped by. They spent over 15 min. reading every poster section and asked focused questions about my research and plans for the future.
They were both from an R1 institution –the same department had published extensively (I checked out later), and had an interest in the topic of my dissertation: Teacher Attrition and Retention issues using a national data set.
What I remember to this day is not only the way they asked me topical questions on the dataset, data coding, and analyses, in a very non-intimidating and informal way but more importantly, how they showed a genuine interest in my work and how they made me feel after our conversation. Both of them provided feedback to make improvements to the implications and conclusion sections and gave me very useful tips on how to successfully defend that summer. That stuck.
Upon my successful defense in late summer, I emailed both of them thanking them for their sage advice and how that helped me defend with confidence. They acknowledged seeing me at the conference, congratulated me on my defense, encouraged me to publish my work, and wished that our paths would cross again. They called me Dr.
One of them noted: Pay it forward, Kavita.
(Why yes, I do keep the conference lanyards for a bit.)
