Professional conferences for university faculty are a combination of scholarly papers, (sometimes) pedagogical sessions, conversations in elevators and when standing in line for coffee, and meeting up with old friends and former students. I go to one each year, and often two. This next week I am off to the College Art Association meeting in New York, and I am looking forward to it.
When I was an undergrad there was no such thing as an undergraduate research conference or even the opportunity to give a presentation beyond the senior seminar or talking in a class. Now there are sessions for undergrads at many disciplinary conferences, as well as the National Conference of Undergraduate Research and the Council on Undergraduate Research-sponsored Posters on the Hill. There are more regional opportunities -- poster presentations in the capitol building of most states and many undergraduate research conferences at individual universities or state levels. The more practice our students have at presenting the better off they will be at their first post-undergraduate conference.
The first conference I went to was my second year in graduate school, one that focused on the Amarna Period and was at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. We missed graduate school classes and the professor said that he would cancel them (there were four of us in the class and three were going to the conference) if we reported back on the conference, session by session. After we got back of course we realized that he just wanted to make sure we were actually going to the conference and he didn't care about hearing about the conference. That taught me that the conference sessions, while an important component of the experience, are not all one goes to a conference for.
Networking
In grad school I went to one conference each year after that. Usually it was the general Egyptology conference but there was at least one more specific one. Over time I got to meet more people, both graduate students and professionals. It was fun to see people year after year, and to gradually feel more at home as a professional. We piled four or more people into friend's apartments or (in a worst case scenario) to share the cost of the conference hotel. The receptions had drink tickets or open bars, and hanging out with drunk archaeologists was always entertaining. For some people this might have resulted in benefits (excavation invitations, teaching possibilities, opportunities to give papers at conferences), but for me it was more the social discussions, and scholarly problem-solving that happened in the bars late at night. It never resulted in anything like a job, but it made me into a scholar and that was fine with me.
The networking that the College Art Association (CAA) conference offers is much more challenging. Unlike my disciplinary conferences there are a huge number of people who attend (in the thousands). You might run into people a second or third time, but it is purely accidental. But they provide something that the larger conferences can and the smaller ones don't. There are grad (and undergrad) students who monitor the rooms, make sure that everyone has a conference badge, who help out with projection (less of a challenge these days that there are not slides, but still a potential disaster if you have a computer crash). Two of our students are going this year, and the payment for this work includes conference registration, plus $100 for monitoring 4 sessions. But potentially the chance to meet and talk with other students and find out about grad programs and what being a grad student is like will be the most valuable experience. That plus the ability to run away in NY a bit. That will be fun for them.
Content
I still am one of the geeks who goes to a conference primarily for the papers. I learn cool new things, stuff I can use in my class lecture, and intriguing new approaches to teaching. I taught my first museum studies/museum practice class last spring so this year I am particularly interested in attending any session about how to use a museum and how to incorporate museum activities in the class experience, particularly from those small schools that do not have a true museum, either art or any other kind, and how they provide these opportunities for their students. I also am interested in a session on artistic responses to the Arab Spring. There is a whole session on the Dome of the Rock, and ones on Southeast Asian art and teaching non-western art in a blended studio/art history department. Plus there are former students and friends whose papers I will try to get to. This is the fun part of the conferences. If the papers are good -- sometimes they are terrible and I have trouble staying awake or sitting still. I have my fingers crossed that this will not be the case this time. I am not presenting myself, but I will probably try to get a paper in for the next year's conference in Chicago.
The Rest of the Going-to-a-Conference Experience
When I was a grad student in Canada and we went south of the border for a conference, my friends and I took advantage of (what were then) cheaper prices and spent an afternoon going to a mall or a big department store. We would buy a dress or something to wear to the conference, so it wasn't quite as ridiculous or unjustifiable an excursion as it sounds in retrospect. I also make a point of going to at least one museum besides the obvious (i.e. if a conference is at the Oriental Institute, the OI's museum doesn't count). This year I am going to NY a day early so I can make a major museum excursion. It will be the Cloisters this year, which I have not visited before. I teach the first half of the western art survey and am sitting in on a medieval art class, so this is a good time for me to make this visit. One other museum I am visiting is the Tenement Museum, which is completely non-art, but will be a good one for me to use as a study for my museums class. My students will be going to a wide variety of museums while they are not at the conference, and I think they will get a lot out of the week.
The other nice thing about a conference is that it takes you to places you wouldn't go to otherwise. It can be a new city, a place you would never think about visiting if there wasn't a clear reason for the trip. But it can be an exciting thing to try regional cuisine, walk along a new river, shop in one of the great department stores or quirky vintage shops that mark the personality of each city. I am actually depressed that CAA only uses NY, Chicago, and LA, as I have had fun in Boston and Philly, would love to see the art scene in San Francisco or Montreal. Oh well. The other organization I go to the meetings of is the Council on Undergraduate Research, which has gotten me to Bozeman, MT (cool dinosaur museum and I took a couple of days at the end of the summer conference to drive down to Yellowstone), Trenton (an excursion to the Princeton Art Museum), Ogden, UT (an excursion to the Great Salt Lake was really fun, something the university provided as an optional trip after the conference).
The Next Generation
The only thing you will see I didn't talk about with the conference is the job interviewing. I teach undergraduates only so I don't have to worry about mentoring academic job seekers. There are still tenure track jobs in academia (we have several at my university this next year) but they are few and far between. I fortunately only had to go through one of those years of interview after interview after interview. It is a devastatingly nerve-wracking experience, and one that a lot of universities are moving away from. A lot of grad students or people out there in academic-land who are on the job market cannot afford to attend conferences, and doing all telephone or skype interviews is more equitable and broadens the field of candidates. Jobs that used to be posted only at the conference now are posted on line as soon as they are posted at the conference.
In other words, the big stressful job center stuff is not central to my university's experience, and while some colleges might rely on it, it is less important to attend conferences for job interviews than it has been in the past.
Teaching Benefits
So this coming week I have a trip to a conference and I am missing teaching my classes next week (my students are not -- there are videos for the area studies class where we have been talking about representations of place in film; there is a visit to the archives for the art history one; the sometimes-team-taught course will be led by my colleague). But I will be better prepared in content and process, with new ideas and new information, and a visit to at least two interesting museums of very different types, and conversations with former students about what their grad school programs are like, what they would suggest our undergraduate program provide to our students that we are not offering, and what they would recommend for future directions. I will also be enthusiastic about my classes when I return. In other words, it is a good thing for me to go to these periodically, and I am glad some of my students and colleagues will also be taking advantage of this opportunity.
Do you like going to conferences? Or do you avoid them like the plague or a particularly slithery poisonous snake?