Academia. It’s a Mystery

One very exciting thing about being a postgraduate student is that I get to attend a lot of academic conferences. But I also know just enough to enable me to submit papers and presentations of my own. There are whole events designed to give postgraduate students this kind of experience, and I’m jumping at the chance to take part. I’m currently working on two proposals which I need to submit within the next few days. One to a conference, and one to a launch event for an academic blog. One is a more traditional proposal of a paper, but as the other is creative, I have some leeway to choose how I approach it. The truth is I have no idea what I’m doing.

I’m not a first-generation university student. My dad has a BSc degree in something to do with computer science (sorry dad for not remembering). But I still feel utterly clueless when it comes to the unspoken rules of academia. How do you submit to conferences? What information should you include? How are you supposed to convey your message in 250 words? Do you tell them the results of your study? The design? The title alone and a vague description of what it’s about? These feel like a mystery that I’m somehow supposed to solve with minimal information. Access issues aside, the studying part of academia is the easy part. I know how to read journal articles and write essays. What I don’t understand are all of these rules that seem to keep academic institutions ticking along. I can’t ask my parents. My dad hasn’t presented at conferences and I’m not even sure my mother knows what I’m studying.

It’s utterly baffling if I’m being honest. Does it vary by institution? By conference? Does everyone else feel as confused as I am, or do they know what they’re doing? The question I’d most like the answer to is where do we find this information? I know I can Google it and believe me I have. But with a wealth of conflicting information out there, how does a student like me know what to believe. And what about students who were getting their master’s’ and PhDs before Google existed? What did they do? Are we supposed to photosynthesise this information from the very sacred environment of the university campus like some overly brainy plant? I’m probably going to email my applied project supervisor and hope he takes pity on me and explaines the mysteries of academic conferences, because I’m totally lost.

So congratulations to all of you who, like me, don’t have parents who can share this information with you, but who made it to the other side regardless. I want to say that we are better people because of the struggle, but I’m not going to waste my time on useless platitudes. We are pretty determined though, and that has to count for something.