How to Have Your Best Academic Conference

Every year, the week before Thanksgiving sees several major conferences for biblical studies and related disciplines.¹ Not the least of these is the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature.

The SBL annual meeting is quite large itself, and it usually co-meets with the American Academy of Religion. So, the scale of the event can make it challenging to navigate well. That said, a few, simple steps will vastly improve your conference experience. These are to

1. Plan your schedule in advance.
2. Budget adequate time to get around.
3. Focus on the sessions you attend.
4. Take notes.
5. Come to learn and contribute.
6. Make your paper hearable.
7. Enjoy the book exhibit and the serendipity of spontaneous meetings.

1. Plan your schedule in advance.

At just about any conference—and especially at the larger ones—there’s too much to take it all in.² Maybe you have an open space in your schedule. But just because you could fit a session there doesn’t mean you should.

Instead, use the program or planner to find the sessions most pertinent for you. You’ll still have plenty to do. And by being choosey about the sessions you attend, you’ll be able to engage more fully with those that most align with your interests.

In addition, academic conferences offer great opportunities to (re)connect with others. Simply by virtue of attending, everyone who is somewhat out of their usual routines. So, during free time during the conference can provide a great time to catch up, collaborate on current projects, or pitch new ideas.

2. Budget adequate time to get around.

The bigger the conference venue, the longer it takes to get from place to place. Maybe you’re going from one room to another in the same building. But even if so, it might well take you 15–30 minutes for you to make the trip.

So, plan your schedule to include this transit time. For instance, I’ll often try to leave 30–45 minutes to migrate from one session or meeting to the next.

By the same token, if at all possible, wear comfortable walking shoes. You might spend plenty of time sitting, talking, and listening. But you might also find you easily get in more than your usual step count.

3. Focus on the sessions you attend.

It doesn’t take attending many academic conference sessions in person before you notice something.³ During the session, some portion of the audience will be focused on

• email,
• social media,
• the program book, or
• really anything besides the session they’re physically attending.

3.1. What multitasking means

Maybe they’re “multitasking.” But even if they are, they’re not fully paying attention.

As you “multitask” among increasing numbers of increasingly complex tasks, your ability to track with any given task drops precipitously. Consequently, multitasking typically doesn’t lead to completing more things in a given amount of time. Instead, it elongates the time you need to complete the tasks you try to bundle.⁴

By contrast, habitual activities require very little attention. For this reason, it may be helpful to distinguish between multitasking and multifocusing.⁵ Multitasking often implies multifocusing. But where it doesn’t, it might be perfectly possible. You can indeed combine habitual activities with other tasks that require more attention. For example, you might be able to fold laundry while listening to a podcast. Or you might be able to knit a scarf while listening to a paper about a quite technical topic.

3.2. Why you shouldn’t try to multifocus

That is, at any given time, your attention can include only a very limited number of things. So, problems naturally arise when you have multiple, competing demands for this limited attention.

3.2.1. You don’t pay attention

For instance, skimming social media is a seemingly simple activity. Yet it’s also language-intensive—even if the language in social posts isn’t the most sophisticated. And of course, following an academic paper is even more language-intensive. So, trying to combine the two doesn’t bode well for giving quality attention to either.

3.2.2. You make it easier to not pay attention

In addition, you can “escape” from an academic paper into the world of email or social media. But when you do, you make it that much easier to pull the escape hatch the next time. As you do, you’re also making it more difficult to focus the next time around on a different paper or cognitively demanding activity.⁶

3.2.3. You miss what’s important

Also, if you’re in a conference session, it’s hopefully because you found value in what it had to offer and deliberately chose to be there. In this case, you’ve already have biased your schedule toward the sessions that you find more worth attending. And if they’re more worth attending, they’re more worth attending to while you’re in them. So, don’t miss the opportunities these sessions provide, even if not all presenters are the best orators.

4. Take notes.

4.1. Why

Taking notes is a simple thing, but it has several benefits. For one, it helps keep your mind from wandering. And if it does less wandering, it also does less searching for distractions like email or social media.

Taking notes also helps you remember the sessions’ content. You might or might not look at your notes again afterward. But your memory gets a bit of a boost just from your having taken the notes in the first place.

4.2. How

You may have an electronic device with you during a session. So, you may want to take notes digitally on that device.

If that works for you, that’s great. Go for it. That said, handwritten notes provide benefits you don’t get if you type.⁷

And if you want to digitize notes after the conference, you can certainly do so. There’s a great open-source document scanner for both Android and iOS. It makes digitizing handwritten pages very easy, even if they’re in notebooks.

5. Come to learn and contribute.

You might be giving a paper or listening to one. But whatever your role in a given session, come both to learn and to contribute.

Come to learn from the presenters about their work and contribute to its discussion. Or come to contribute to and learn from the audience about yours.

5.1. What contributing isn’t

“Contributing” doesn’t mean being a know-it-all—either as a presenter or as an attendee. Particularly if you’re attending a session, rather than presenting in it, contributing doesn’t mean

• “asking a question” that turns into a monologue and scarcely leaves the presenter time to respond.
• squeezing others in the audience out of time to ask their questions.

5.2. What contributing is

Whether you’re presenting or attending, you’re in the session to be a resource. You’re there to share in a way that benefits the group. And both presenters and attendees make critical contributions that determine the quality of the sessions they attend.

5.2.1. For presenters

Presenters clearly contribute through their presentations. They also conritbute by interacting with those who ask questions in any discussion time.

But in both cases, the presenters’ contributions depend on contributions that session attendees make. In particular, if no one

• attends a session or no one who attends the session attends to what the presenter is saying, the presentation doesn’t successfully convey any information, or
• asks any questions during the discussion time, there will just be awkward silence, chat about the lack of engagement, or spontaneous discussion of some other topic.

5.2.2. For attendees

So, as an attendee, you might contribute meaningfully to a session even if you don’t say anything. You enrich the session simply by being there, giving full attention to it, and perhaps interacting with others before and afterward.

If you do contribute a question during the discussion time, try to do so in ways that

• might help the presenter refine his or her argument or
• highlight a topic you’d genuinely like to hear more about.

And “hearing more about” a topic means that you’re hearing while the presenter is talking. If you want to have a fuller conversation, ask to catch the presenter after the session.

But even there, recognize that good interchange isn’t about strutting or “winning” while someone else “loses.” It’s about cooperative creativity. So, even if differences remain (as they probably will), both sides walk away with something gained.⁸

5.3. To decrease imposture syndrome, focus on contributing.

To a session, you can come to contribute. Or you can come to impress. When you come to impress, you might also contribute. But your contribution is inevitably reflexive—“Here’s my contribution, and what a wonderful person you should think I am to have made it.” The only problem is that, in self-aggrandizement, there is always an element of falsehood. Even if you’re a leading expert on one topic, there’s still plenty that you don’t have a clue about. So, when the focus shifts from “here’s this wonderful thing you might find helpful” to “just let me give you the answers,” you won’t be able to deliver the goods—maybe not now, but sometime. This situation leaves you with the option to constantly

1. shove down the knowledge that you don’t have all the answers or
2. experience the gnawing unease of imposter syndrome.

Imposter syndrome certainly can have other roots. But the more you focus on learning and contributing, the less likely you are to either

• give into self-aggrandizement or
• get crippled by imposter syndrome.

6. Make your paper hearable.

For biblicl studies in general, the bar for “acceptably competent public speaking” bar tends to be comparatively low. There are exceptions, but on the whole, biblical scholars aren’t generally known as great orators. If you are, so much the better. But if not, you’re in good company.

Unfortunately, it’s quite common for presenters to write and present papers in ways that effectively make them harder for the audience to comprehend. There’s nothing stopping you from doing this. But you’ll contribute more and invite better engagement with some simple steps that make it easier for your audience to assimilate your work. You can do this in a few ways.

6.1. Read your paper comfortably in the time you have.

First, know how much time you have to present. Write or revise your paper to fit in this time frame. Or clearly mark what sections you can easily skip so that you can fit the allotted time comfortably.

In English, a normal speaking pace tends to be 100–120 words per minute. If you have 20 minutes, that gives you about 2000–2400 words.

Condense your comments so you can speak at a reasonable pace. If you don’t try to speed read, that will help your audience track with your argument.

6.2. Use a “corrected conversational” style.

Second, if you’re writing your paper only to be read, you might be tempted to have one four-line sentence after another. But you probably don’t talk that way. Your audience probably won’t hear best that way either. So, write your paper in a “corrected conversational” style.

Don’t “try to sound smart.” The content of your argument will take care of that more than the grade level of your vocabulary or sentence structure. Instead, say things in your paper like you would in conversation. Just skip the brokenness (e.g., “and um …”) and informality (e.g., “When I read x text, I was like …”) that sometimes characterize ad hoc conversation. C. S. Lewis’s essays are good examples—thoughtful content clearly expressed.

6.3. Explicitly signal your argument’s structure.

Third, give your audience an outline, whether or not you decide to have a handout. In your paper, look for places where you can signal where you are in your argument’s overall structure.

Can you give an outline at the end of your introduction? As you go through your reasons for a given point, can you explicitly enumerate those reasons?

Such structural signals help your audience hear your paper better. They may prove particularly helpful if your time slot is later in a day or later in a conference to an audience that’s correspondingly more “papered over.”

6.4. Read your paper at a good volume.

Fourth, read your paper at a good volume. Often, rooms don’t have audio equipment. So, that can make things tricky—especially for those of us who are normally more soft-spoken.

Certainly, don’t yell at your audience. But do speak up, particularly if the audience is more dispersed in a larger room.

As you read, look for signs about whether attendees are having difficulty hearing. You might not be able to accommodate everyone. But do try to moderate your volume accordingly, which can go a long way.

7. Enjoy the book exhibit and the serendipity of spontaneous meetings.

Two things that an in-person conference facilitates really well are book exhibits and spontaneous meetings. And often, those happen in the same space.

These features are another reason that, if you’re attending in person, you want to be choosey about which sessions you attend. The program doesn’t have a slot for “go through the book exhibit, find what’s been published that you hadn’t seen yet, meet new people, and bump into old acquaintances you’ve lost touch with.”

But all those activities are part of what make an in-person conference something you can leave feeling satisfied about when it’s done. So, be sure to make the most of these kinds of opportunities during the conference also.

Conclusion

It can take some work to get the most from an academic conference. It might take going more than once to find how to do it better next time. But with forethought and preparation, conferences can provide great opportunities for you to hone your craft as a biblical scholar.