Spelman Research Day

Visiting my alma mater always fills me with a sense of joy and peace at coming home. I served as a judge for the oral sessions in psychology at Spelman College’s Research Day. I love those days that remind you of why you love doing what you’re doing and this was definitely one of them.  As a full fledged night owl, being awake and functioning at 6:00am is usually torture but I was too excited to get to be a judge. As a previous award winning presenter myself, I always love coming back and hearing the work that the current students are doing and providing insights into applying to graduate programs. I know I know, that was a shameless tooting of my own horn but if you don't remind yourself of how awesome you are then, FUN FACT- the constant feedback could wear at your spirit in graduate school if you start to take criticisms of your work personally instead of the constructive manner they are usually meant.

After that aside to embracing you're awesomeness back to research day. I was extremely impressed by my Spelman psychology sisters on Friday! Their presentations were well articulated and visually stunning (I was SWOONING at their infographics) and easily on par with other graduate student presentations I have seen. Made me want to put on my recruiter hat and woo them to my department! Asking them questions about their work and writing my feedback gave me a glimpse of a fraction of what it will be like when I am a faculty member. Experiences like these where I am able to give my time to budding researchers, particularly other women of color, reminds me of how much I love academia and my aspirations towards tenure.

Restez Chic Toujours!

Conference Chic: Preparation is Key

Thanks to my Pre-Conference Planning Rituals, the week before a conference is often the most fun time making preparations as opposed to a stressful rush trying to get things together. As you can see in this colorful image here, I am at my desk and browsing the conference website. Since these websites tend to get updated regularly with changes until the meeting, I usually wait until the week before to start planning my time at the meeting. I downloaded the conference app and started familiarizing myself with its interface so that once I arrived at SRCD I could use it to seamlessly navigate the different events.

My new business cards were also delivered this week and I was BEYOND excited to see Doctoral Candidate on them! I highly recommend that no mater what stage you are in of your career that you get some made. I have had a business card since my freshman year at Spelman College when all it had was my name, Spelman email address, and Agent of Change as my "position". I believe they make a lasting impact while networking and makes me feel a different level of prepared and professional. I usually get 250 made and there are a lot of resources for free ones online, your university may offer to pay, or you can get some business card paper from Staples and print them off yourself with Microsoft Word.

This is also when I download the final Program PDF onto my iPad in Evernote. Evernote is my go to app for corralling, tagging, and organizing all of the information that comes into my life because I love how easy it is to find so many different types of information. In order to best prepare for your conference maximizing Evernote's features I suggest that you...

*Create a new notebook with the title and year of the conference
*Use the Forward Email to Evernote feature for any conference related email updates you get and save them all to this notebook for easy offline access
*Download a PDF version of the final conference program and also save it as a new note in this notebook
*Use the annotation feature to mark which talks in the program you plan to attend
*Take pictures of poster presentations, fliers, and business cards of those contacts you are interested in staying in contact with
*Use well titled notes to take notes at the different talks you will be attending

I hope you found this helpful and I look forward to giving you more tips during this blog series!

Restez Chic Toujours!

Conference Chic Series

Attending scientific conferences and meetings are a large part of grad school life; it also happens to be one of my favorites! I returned from the Society for Research in Child Development’s Biennial Meeting a few weeks ago and am still riding on the productivity surge that attending these conferences gives me.  Since I am on a leave of absence right now, I almost declined to attend this conference since I was not presenting this year but I am so glad that I went! I was terrified that people would ask me what I’m working on now (which is mostly reading papers in my newer areas of interest and Netflix) but I focused on the direction I want to take my research program and received so much support and many helpful suggestions that it was amazing! 

Attending and presenting at conference’s in your field of study are great for...

1. Staying up to date on the current trends in your field
2. Getting feedback on your own work by other researchers 
3. Gaining exposure to areas of the literature outside of your specific subfield
4. Connecting with scientists at all different career levels
5. Reconnecting with former undergraduate classmates and faculty 
6. Networking with leaders in the field whose work you have repeatedly cited

If you have never attended one of these meetings it can be rather overwhelming especially at some of the larger ones. But I am here to share with you my tips for successfully navigating these conferences. I had so many ideas that the original post became incredibly long and even I did not want to read further than the first section.  So I decided to turn this into a mini blog series! I will be talking about how I prepare for conferences, how to effectively navigate the meeting spaces, networking tips, and other tricks that will help you maximize your time effectively. Enjoy!

Restez Chic Toujours!