Conferencing for beginners

The coming few weeks there's a shed load of free (!) workshops for postgrads at my uni, so obviously I've enrolled in a few. Nothing as good as free education. I am a firm believer in free education for everyone, because education is the best way to enable people to make their own choices in life, but let's not get off on a tangent here. Conferencing was the topic of the day. As an academic you are expected to go to conferences, preferably 'giving papers' (which is academic jargon for 'doing a presentation' or 'public speaking about your work'), hence as a postgrad you have to work your way into the conferencing business. Good for networking, getting feedback from peers on your research and, not to be forgotten, having fun. The conference flyers all mention gala dinners and excursions to wineries etc. That would obviously be meant for networking, won't it?

Anyway, the workshop lady was an experienced conferencer and gave us some nice tips. Such as to be aware that the deadline for abstracts (of papers you might like to present) is mostly 6 months before the actual conference. This means you have to plan ahead and keep an eye out for 'calls for papers'. It also made me realise I'm very lucky, because I get additional money to spend on attending conferences, which is not the usual way apparently. Now I just have to find some useful ones in my area, which should be 'traffic psychology'. Unfortunately the traffic psychologists are very busy, so for this year I haven't found any conferences yet. But I'll keep looking, even if I have no clue of what to present, if anything. Being a participant would suit me fine for now.

The only thing from this workshop I totally disagree with is the tip to READ your paper instead of presenting it! As a journalist I have attended many conferences on a diversity of topics and the people reading their stuff are the most boring EVER. Participants actually fall asleep during some of these 'presentations', especially after lunch. Why? Because reading aloud is a very tricky thing to do, you tend to go too fast, use a monotonous voice and lose contact with the audience completely. So my tip is: do NOT read your paper. Practice you presentation until you know what you're talking about. Realise the earth won't shake if you forget to say something. Then just go out there and talk. Engage yourself with the audience. And HAVE FUN!