Dressed to present

How should one dress to present at a conference?

Next week Management Consulting Division of the the Academy of Management is having its biennial conference in Amsterdam, where I'm presenting a paper written with my supervisors on my PhD research. I'm hoping not just to get good feedback on the paper, but new ideas on where to go next and how to develop it, something I can share with the supervisors in order to write a publishable paper for a quality journal.

For the viva, I wore in my best suit, hair freshly washed, makeup professional and under stated. At previous conferences I've been a student, but now I'm through the viva, shouldn't I dress professionally to present at a conference ?

Revising and writing papers

Phew! I just uploaded a conference paper "Cycles of Engagement", due in today!

Revising my work for the viva started with

1. reviewing generic viva questions,
   
2. then the more specific ones that came up in the mock viva.
   
3. A third approach is to write a paper for a conference, and that's been the focus of my work over the last couple of weeks.
   

Of course, this conference paper for the Management Consulting Division biennial conference has got my supervisors' names on it, and deservedly so. After speaking with someone from the MCD at the Academy of Management conference last August, I was encouraged to present at the PhD consortium, but once I approached the MCD they suggested I presented a paper at the full conference. I wrote a proposal, and they accepted it, to my surprise and delight. But I shouldn't be so surprised, because now at the end of my PhD, I know what I have to say, so perhaps I wrote a sensible and interesting proposal.

After the mock viva, my supervisors offered to help me to write this paper, and I'm glad they did, because, in the last few weeks, I've learned a lot from the way they write. One supervisor addressed the challenge of how to put all the richness and detail that makes a PhD study what it is - into just 8000 words, restructuring the original paper I wrote; the other has greatly improved the flow of the argument. Whenever am I going to learn to write like this!

Why write a paper before your viva? Because it:

• helps you to identify the key points of your thesis,
  
• makes you reread parts of your thesis,
  
• helps you spot typos and mistakes before the examiner points them out to you

If the conference were before my viva, I'd also have practised speaking the points I'm learning by heart for the viva. But the viva is in May (probably) and the conference is in June. Look here for the paper if you want to read it because it's a good summary of my work.

I'll welcome constructive feedback, so do contact me through this web form.

Conference

Am in Montreal for Academy of Management conference that starts on Friday. It's an enormous event with thousands of delegates, very American influenced. Each day has half a dozen activities timed for each of three or four sessions in one of four different venues. I'm going to spend today finding out where these venues are.

CETL conference

At the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) conference on campus today and tomorrow, I notice the word engagement in a lot of places. For example:

• MBA pathways: expectations, engagement and reality: does the MBA produce critically engaged managers?
• designing learning activities in second life for student engagement
• critical engagement in management and business education
• student engagement with e-assessment.

Learning engagement is an area that people are researching. It's research that may overlap with my research that looks at the way people engage with each other on a mutual project, coming with different skills and that situation, like learning, requires elements of communication and knowledgeability. By knowledgeability I don't just mean knowledge transfer but an ability to transfer knowledge by teaching others or learning from others, an ability to learn, an ability to teach. You need communication to activate and use that knowledgeability. The combination is engagement; engagement between people on projects requires the same elements as engagement in learning.

Presentation success

Our student to student presentations gained rewards. One of us the other day that as a result of the presentation he'd done for us a week or so earlier, he'd rewritten major parts of his presentation and cut out a lot. As a result, at the conference where he presented, he won an award for best presenter and £250.

He deserves it. He's the one who started off these sessions two years ago.

EURAM rejection

I'm glum because my proposal to the EURAM doctoral colloquium has been rejected - it could be the first of many. However, the reviewers sent feedback. The rejection may be because the proposal didn't mention the IT literature from journals like Organization Science and Organization Studies (my first interest was in the consultants and then I specialised in IT consultants) which the reviewers found "surprising and problematic". But they suggested that I also look at literature on occupations and roles by authors such as Bechky.

I emailed my supervisors with the glum news, and they're being consolatory and practical, attaching papers on

• IT by Robey
• workplace artifacts by Bechky.

So I plod glumly onwards and onwards.

What's wrong with this proposal? or right?

I have to rush to get a proposal together for the May EURAM conference doctoral colloquium, which has to be in by 12 January along with:

• a letter of recommendation from my supervisors,
• my CV,
• my letter of motivation (what on earth is one of those!) and
• a signed statement stating that "in the case of acceptance for the doctoral colloquium I have the funding and will definitely participate in the doctoral colloquium".

So I've abandoned my transcribing and analysis, and have got the outline of my proposal together. It will be useful to submit it because if you get it in and accepted then they send it out to other participants to read and then you get feedback on it at the colloquium, and that could be really useful. Mind you, what I'm submitting is the proposal for the research that I've already started, and I don't have the time to submit findings, but by May, I'll have findings and a better idea of what I've found. Nevertheless, getting good feedback will be helpful and still in time to use it to amend research questions, case study approach or method of analysis or what literature I need. And they promise you that each discussion group is supervised by a senior researcher. It should be really useful. So I'll get opinions from several sensible people on what is wrong or right with my work.

If you're interested, here's the pdf for the doctoral colloquium. Will you be there?

BAM doctoral symposium: career & RATS

I enjoyed this session that Chris Huxham gave on potential careers after PhD (Who for? For me?!).

RATS is a mnemonic for

• Researching
• Administration
• Teaching
• Service

It had more or less the same content as the OUBS research week session in July (See here). But

1. was visually interesting and
2. added a service component

That service component sounds likeHandy's portfolio, volunteering, doing extra that is socially useful, like joining a special interest group or volunteering for a board. It would help the networking as well as open other areas of research or work. I don't remember all her arguments.

But her visuals included RATS!
Moving rats in cartoons - I wonder why she got the images from

Conferences

Next week I'm attending my first conference as a post grad. I'm going to the BAM conference in Harrogate. I'm not presenting a paper - they had to be in by around April this year and there was no way I was going to have anything ready. I'm just going to look and listen. Here are the details of what to expect.

I've been to conferences before, such as the UKSS conference, which is on now - see here or the OU teaching and learning conference but as an associate lecturer when I was teaching systems or in how to teach. I've registered for the CETL conference later in the month too since it is here on campus.