Presenting a Conference Paper

Presenting the conference paper

Time really flies!

I spent too much time on the motivation and experiment design, I think, and then had to POWER my way through the Results and Conclusions.

Thank God for the little things:

1) I only had a few slides 

- I had more initially but my sensible co-author reminded me to focus on my TOPIC. I am glad that I'd showed them to her a week or so before the Conference. 

2) Nobody interrupted my talk with a self-aggrandizing question.

I have been blessed by the gods because nobody was out there to tear me to shreds as I attended a few sessions where college professors were literally at each other's throats - one didn't listen to the question carefully and was seriously defensive while the esteemed one showed that he didn't suffer fools gladly even if he was a gentleman and she was a lady.

Lessons learned from presenting a research paper at a conference: 

1. Prepare well ahead in advance 
2. Present your research in good faith - you'll get people to respond positively to you. 
3. Respond positively to audience feedback and comments as best as you can.

From the experience of presenting my first conference paper, the academic community can be incredibly supportive and helpful - all you need to do is to ask for help :)

Q1. Why did you choose that research methodology and that technology? (a well-known researcher)

i) my research methodology 

*I should have responded that the research methodology was the one most suitable to answer the research questions. 

ii) the technology that I used in my study

I responded that I used that tech because it was the most accessible to my respondents.

He suggested that I use another technology that yielded more data for analysis and that's what I am looking into now.

Life as a doctoral student is NOT easy as I have seen some serious drama esp among committee members.

Academic writing workshop

Anyway, I was in an academic writing workshop for graduate students where all we did was write, discuss, consult our committee members, read, write again, discuss and then go back to furiously typing out your research article.

Naturally, the person next to me is the one who goes:

"Wow, my paper has been accepted! I didn't know it was going to be so fast!"

My co-author, the benevolent and compassionate human being, smiled kindly and said,

"Good job! Now, you can work on that other paper..."

Work in Progress

Me? I was silently trying to:

• digest the various literature review sections I was reading and trying to piece them together, 
• trying to figure out my conceptual framework (is it original? Does it aim to create new knowledge or theories in my specialist area? Does it build on existing knowledge or theories?) and 
• "fine-tune" my methodology section. 

Anyway, I thought that I could finish up on the research paper first and then work on the conference paper. After all, what's there to another paper presentation, right? Wrong.

As it turns out, we were all too busy in the last few weeks running up to the Conference that we literally had only days to work on the conference paper! Please remember Lesson no. 1.

Here's a guide from Duke University on how to turn your research paper into a conference paper:

http://twp.duke.edu/uploads/media_items/paper-to-talk.original.pdf