Professional Development: Conference Tips III: Making the Most of In-Person Conference Experiences
Academic conferences are major opportunities to meet new people in your field, learn more about specific topics, and form new professional connections. But they can often feel overwhelming. This webinar focuses on how to make the most of the networking, learning, and professional development opportunities, as well as how to avoid burnout in the process.
Robert Fite, a postdoctoral researcher at Indiana University Bloomington, detailed practical tips and guidance for making the most of conferences, especially if you are new to attending them.
Fite recommended setting goals and priorities for the conferences. “It’s important to know yourself in terms of thinking of your goals for the conference,” he said. “What do you want most to prioritize?” Knowing what you want to get out of the conference is a key element in getting the most out of it. It’s also important to schedule breaks during the event and manage expectations. “Not every conference is going to be, this great conference where you build all these connections and learn all these new skills. “Some will and some, won’t,” he said. “So just allow yourself that grace”.
Conferences are great opportunities to create and strengthen connections with other professionals in any given field, said David Clewett, a psychological scientist at University of California, Los Angeles.
One way to optimize networking, Clewett advised, is to reach out to people you want to connect with before the conference starts. Staying after sessions to meet with presenters can also help network attendees to stand out.
“It’s never a bother or nuisance and it shows interest in what they’re doing,” he said.
Networking is also a personal endeavor, so in addition to making connections for professional reasons, it’s also helpful to connect on a personal level, Clewett advised.
“This isn’t all about navigating your professional life, it’s also about becoming friends with these people.” he said.
Presenting at conferences can present many professional- development opportunities. As Dr. Clewett noted, presenting research can often serve as a test run for submitting a paper for publication. By being open to feedback, you can make your paper stronger before it’s submitted.
“It’s not just about nailing this presentation,” Clewett said. “It’s about being open to feedback and learning more about your own work through other people’s perspectives”.
Speakers
David Clewett
University of California Los AngelesDr. Clewett is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and director of the Adaptive Cognition, Memory, and Emotion (ACME) Lab. He is also the Bernice Wenzel and Wendell Jeffrey Term Endowed Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. His research investigates how dynamic changes in emotion and arousal not only influence what we remember, but also how memories are segmented, organized, and integrated over time. His lab further examines how arousal dysregulation in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) contributes to memory fragmentation, with the goal of identifying early biomarkers and targets for intervention. Prior to joining UCLA, he received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Southern California in 2016, where he worked with Dr. Mara Mather to study emotion-cognition interactions. He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Lila Davachi at New York University and Columbia University, where he investigated how episodic memories are constructed from continuous experience.
Robert Fite
University of IndianaDr. Robert Fite is a postdoctoral fellow in the Study of Affective Disorders’ Classification and Treatment (SADCAT) lab at Indiana University. His research interests are focused on studying risk factors for the development and maintenance of internalizing disorders (e.g., PTSD), as well as how to improve treatment outcomes for those with internalizing disorders. A particular focus of his work is on understanding the ways in which situations are interpreted or appraised affect subsequent outcomes, as well as how cognitive change strategies can be optimized to improve outcomes.
