Some unsolicited advice for junior people at classics conferences

I generally hate unsolicited advice, hence the title’s acknowledgement that this is in a genre of things that are quite rude. But I was given a lot of good professionalism training in graduate school (I know not everyone has that!) and I do think I have some thoughts that might be helpful for first-time conference-goers. If it’s not, ignore it completely, as is a generally good policy with most unsolicited advice. I wrote another short piece about what I really think is the most important thing in order to have a good conference experience, which is having a conference buddy. You can read that here!

What to wear:

I can only speak to women here, since that’s all I know, and the expectations are very different for men and NB/GNC folks. This is all “here’s my experience, in case you find it helpful,” not anything prescriptive.

Most people will be wearing something in a vaguely business/business-casual ballpark. That will range from a few very sharp-dressed types, who will have swanky shoes and well-tailored clothes, to people in slacks and a nice top. There are some people in business-y dresses. Blazers are somewhat optional in my opinion (though not for interviews — that’s a different game and there are way more complicated considerations you may have to navigate there).

I was once told not to over-dress because grad students over-dress and if I went with a less formal outfit, it would look like I’d been there before. I sort of took this and ran with it, and I don’t know if I’ve ever worn a blazer to general conference stuff (though also, I hate blazers).

There are people in the field who will expect you to look more traditional. That means “traditional” gender presentation. I don’t say this to suggest that anyone change their personal style, but just to let you know that you will encounter people who are either confused or judgey if you are dressing in a more androgynous style, for instance. Just be ready for that — if you aren’t on the job market and/or those people aren’t important people in your field, it truly doesn’t matter what they think. Also, vests are awesome and if you have a vest, always wear a vest.

Receptions

Receptions are great. You get to chat with classicists and dork out about the ancient world, often over a drink!

If you aren’t a socially comfortable person, take a friend.

Regardless of your social comfort, a few things the program won’t tell you (about SCS receptions):

• You don’t have to have any connection with a school to attend the reception. You can just show up! Is your fave scholar at Michigan — head to their reception and see if you can meet them. Are you looking to apply to something at UC Berkeley? Head to their reception and meet some folks!
• The WCC/LCC/COGSIP reception is fun and welcoming and has a great spread of food! Also there’s a costume theme (with prizes) and awards given out for the best advocacy and scholarship on women and gender. Do not miss it.
• However, most receptions do not have much in the way of food. I would suggest a nice meal beforehand, because the snacks at receptions (if there are any) are not enough to fill up your tummy and soak up an evening’s worth of alcohol.
• Speaking of alcohol, most people will be drinking at receptions. If you are not drinking, and you don’t want to answer rude questions about why you aren’t, consider getting a seltzer water and garnishing it with a lime. Also, a half-full glass of something is a great accessory and everyone assumes you’re halfway through some numbered glass of wine, and no one asks questions. Friendly reminder that you don’t have to drink and it’s no one’s damn business why you aren’t.
• Chatting over drinks is great fun. Making a scene because you became too drunk and belligerent is not. You don’t have to keep pace with anyone. And we’ve all heard Pindar’s opinion about how best to pace yourself while drinking (water is best!). You’re probably wearing a nametag while at receptions, so people will be able to identify you. Just be smart.
• People will look down at your nametag. Brace yourself for them looking back up — sometimes it’s just to see your name, in case they think they might know your scholarship but not your face. Or they already met you and forgot your name. Or they’re just curious to see if they know anyone at your institution. Those are the understandable nametag-checks. The ugly ones are when people are looking for your institution’s name to see if you’re worth talking to. The general practice among this sort of nametag-checker is Ivy Leagues and a few others are “worth talking to” and everyone else isn’t. This is a bummer, but it is what it is. On the plus side, you aren’t really missing out on much there. You’ll meet kinder and more interesting people once you’ve been abandoned by someone who doesn’t deem you worth their time.

Presentation Materials?

Some philology people expect a handout, but the number of people who feel very strongly about having a handout are going down. If your talk is very dependent on close-reading the Greek or Latin, I’d suggest a handout. If your talk isn’t, I think you can get away without a paper handout — you can either make a digital copy available and direct people to that link, or you can use a PowerPoint. There are conventions by subspecialties in the field that you should maybe ask about, but my impression is that you don’t need a paper handout if your talk doesn’t lend itself to one.

The flip side of that is that sometimes it’s nice for people to have your contact information readily available. A handout is a convenient way to do that.

Personal preference: I tend to make bibliography/references available online and then use either PowerPoint for a more thematic talk where people aren’t going to want to flip back and forth to see the different passages I’m discussing, or a paper handout for a more text-dependent talk.

A word on accessibility — fonts without serifs are the most accessible fonts. I know we all have font preferences and many of us think that serifs are pretty, but a font without serifs is going to be most accessible to your audience (I prefer Verdana but Helvetica and Arial are also up there for accessibility). Similarly, if you’re using PowerPoint, you can preview what your slides will look like to someone with color blindness here.

Regardless of what you’re doing provide an English translation of your Greek or Latin (or other) text! If you’re highlighting a few bits in a longer passage, bold/underline the corresponding Greek/Latin and English. Asking someone to follow your argument while translating in their head is a ridiculous cognitive load. Most of us will tune out of the talk we’re listening to and read the Greek/Latin, if we can. Others will ignore the text. Very very few people can do both.

Panel Participation and Good Academic Citizenship

I’m passing these on because they were impressed upon me, and they have always served me well. But they are not terribly well observed. I really think these are good guidelines for everyone to follow as much as they can.

1. Do not go over time! You are taking time away from your other panelists when you do so. DO. NOT. GO. OVER. TIME. If your talk is a little too long for the time slot, you can use the classic “I’m glossing over X in the interest of time, but I would be happy to talk about that in questions” line. If you are a panel moderator, do not let people go over time and if they do, take that time out of their question period. I’ve seen multiple panels where the last panelist or two is getting less than their allotted time, when their only crime was being placed at the end of the panel. It’s incredibly uncomfortable, but if you are moderating, please institute some sort of time-communicating signal to let your speakers know that they have run out of time.
2. If you are a member of the audience for a paper that has some problems, there are a few appropriate ways to deal with that, and many inappropriate ones. You can make a gentle, well-intentioned comment to the effect of “I think your argument would be stronger if you thought about X” or “have you considered this potential objection to your argument?” You can politely speak to them after the paper and raise some of your thoughts then. Politely. What you should not do is bully a fellow academic to show everyone what a super smart person you are. That is mean and petty and extremely inappropriate. And only fellow mean people will be impressed by it. If you must make a fairly strong, critical intervention in the moment, try to think about the “punching up” rule. If you are a grad student, you can criticize basically anyone. If you are a faculty member, you should only attack people more senior than you. If you are a senior academic, you should really only come after your fellow senior folks. Punching down is not helping anything and you are just going to traumatize and dishearten a young scholar. If you are a moderator and this is happening, it is your job to intervene.
3. “This is more of a comment than a question” — this line gets a lot of well-deserved mockery because this is sort of the signature line of people who just want to pontificate instead of contribute to the paper at hand. I’m only one person, so take this with a grain of salt, but I don’t think the “comment not question” is necessarily bad. I’ve received some really valuable feedback from comments after my talks. But I’ve also been in a lot of talks where people have asked questions like “That was a really interesting paper on Solon’s poetry and I was just curious if you’d considered how that relates to my own work on Ovid’s Heroides?” Sometimes this comes (in less overt form) from a real desire to generate a question if there aren’t any questions after a paper, but it’s also ludicrously difficult for someone to answer when they were not at all prepared to think about something that’s wildly different than the topic of the paper they just gave.

Live-tweeting a Panel

I wrote a thing about this that I still generally stand by, which is here. Conference tweeting is a great way for people who can’t attend to follow along. It makes material more accessible to a wider audience. Yay tweeting!

That said, not everyone wants their talk to be broadcast. Some talks are on material that hasn’t been published yet and there are legitimate reasons that material can’t be photographed and disseminated. Other times it’s an argument that isn’t fully formed yet and people don’t really want it to be permanently on the internet with their name attached.

If you’re giving a talk, consider telling people in advance (or putting it on your materials) if it is ok to tweet that talk. If you aren’t sure, maybe just queue up those tweets and ask the speaker afterwards. I’ve had some people who were thrilled to have their talk live-tweeted and others who asked me not to, so I trashed the thread and instead wrote something like “Really enjoyed [paper title] from [author] in [panel session]!” without any content that wasn’t available in the program.

There’s a great guide to conference tweeting here, from Hamish Cameron and Hannah Čulík-Baird.

Answering Questions

These are some lines I truly wish I’d learned earlier in my conferencing career. Feel free to use any of them:

• No, I haven’t thought about that. It’s a really interesting point though and I will definitely look into it!
• Honestly, I don’t have an answer to that right now, but I would love to talk to you about it more afterwards.
• I haven’t read that book, but it sounds really helpful. Thank you for that recommendation.
• I’m not positive I’ve understood your question correctly. Could you elaborate?
• I don’t have an answer to that — are you thinking of something in particular? (or some variant of asking them their question if they seem to have a very clear answer in mind — I’ve been in friendly panels where a fellow audience member has offered an answer to a good but difficult question!)

I think junior people are terrified of looking like we don’t know what we’re talking about, in large part because we’re all secretly convinced we’ll be discovered as the frauds and imposters that we all fear we are. No one (well, very few people) know everyone about a topic, and it’s not the end of the world to say that you just don’t know.

Anything else? What did I forget?