Random practical advice for those who have never attended a conference before, derived from personal experience
- Make sure sure you have at least one full suit and a pair of dress shoes in your carry-on.
- Pack multiple copies of your paper in different bags. Have an electronic copy on hand as well.
- Do not eat breakfast at the hotel, unless you feel some desperate longing to spend $11 on oatmeal. It pays (or repays) to acquire some bagels, a jar of peanut butter (or whatever suits your fancy), and some plastic tableware. Barring that, find a local McDonald's or other cheap source of food.
- The swankier the hotel, the pricier the WiFi.
- Do your best to make the paper run short (e.g., if you have twenty minutes, aim for eighteen). Real delivery time often deviates from rehearsal delivery time. Besides, nobody will object if your paper comes in a little short, but there will be much gnashing of teeth if you run long. Remember that it's extremely difficult to abridge a paper on the fly (and the audience will notice).
- Speaking of rehearsal, run through your presentation several times before delivering it. If you're reading a paper, you need to be familiar enough with it to make eye contact with the audience; if you're working from notes, you need to be sufficiently comfortable with what you're going to say.
- Excessive jargon frequently = snoozing audience. What works in an article may not work at all when spoken aloud. (This is another reason to rehearse.)
- The usual warnings about PowerPoint apply here. Not least of them: be sure that your presentation will actually run.
- Obey the panel moderator's warnings about time, lest people grumble about you hours, days, or even years later.
- If you plan on ducking out of a session for whatever reason, please sit near the door. This can upset the panelists (even though most of us are aware that some departures are inevitable), so be discreet.
- Even if, like the LP, you are constitutionally predisposed to silence, attend the big conference dinners and keynote presentations. This is a professional event, and you need to mingle, network, etc.
- Unless you're at small conferences where there's only one session at a time (and your absence will be noticed), you aren't expected to attend every session. Leave the hotel, go for a walk, see some sights.
- Take advantage of the discounts at the book exhibit.