![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jhameiaWednesday I was so busy with a student that I was late for a meeting with Dr. L, which meant missing my time window to see Dr. B. Dr. L wanted to know why I haven't written my damned headnote yet. I don't know why. I haven't had the time. But it's got to be done and she gave me a headline: by the last day of finals.
I managed to keep it together and used the afternoon to work on my paper some more and run errands and stuff. I also went to the Ethnic Studies Open House and holy shit they party. I met a lot of their prospective students and hung out with the grads I already knew from my seminars. It was such a good time! I stayed and helped clean up. They have a fucking fridge! A big one! And they had so much food we had to play fridge tetris! Gah!
Yesterday I finished the linguistics diagnostic, handled a CPLT GSA meeting, attended an emergency GSA Council meeting, managed to not go out of my mind with boredom during the lecture review session, survived the seminar (which was great because for some reason we kept on saying "So this is going to be on my paper tomorrow but"), and had a brief rehearsal with a classmate who's doing a script for the mini-conference and wanted to workshop it with her readers a bit. I requested that we be on the same panel too! All three of us had very similar things going on. It's a great script: Alexis Sherman in a waffle house with Seymour, a character he wrote and Pauline, a girl who wants him to make her a star. (It is, now that I think about it, basically Alexie Sherman RPF.) I'm reading Seymour. He was in The Business of Fancy Dancing? We were hoping to have the DVD playing in the background while we read, and rainycafe.com "cafe" sound effects for the ambience of being in a diner XDDDD Went home and made my powerpoint presentation. Yay pretty pictures!
Today was the day! Recruitment day + mini conference. Ridic packed. I got to the conference room at 8am (which means waking up at 6.30am, haugh) and Maurisa tried her laptop and I made sure my USB stick worked. I really wish I'd asked her to test out her planned presentation tech as well.... I'm going to make sure all my co-panelists test out their tech beforehand if I can help it. She forgot the DVD player so she didn't get to test it. Anyway, the tech changeover was not as smooth as I hoped. This makes me want to get my own baby laptop with all necessary programs and such so this will never happen again. It never fails to amaze me how people just don't know how to use their own tools! Panel after panel of people failing to understand how their own machines work.
Of course it was also panel after panel of people reading their goddamn too-long papers. Academics are usually terrible presenters, I find. I would like to say it's because we're grads, but no, I've yawned and napped my way through several boring ass lectures as well.
My panel was, IMHO, the best: we started with a presentation on the Polynesian Panthers, and then my indigenous steampunk presentation. The script reading went off well, even though we didn't get the DVD to work. Most other groups did close readings of text and theory stuff, and we did creative stuff. I think we were certainly the most vibrant group!
Reading and prepping for the script made me realize something else as well--I don't treat things like lectures, presentations and conference talks like they're... well, talks, you know, where you share shiny ideas. I treat it as a performance. My process usually involves a LOT of timed rehearsing of my script, writing down everything ahead of time, even the anecdotes I want to share (even though I improvise in how I tell them), and making sure I'm talking in a way that keeps people engaged.... so a lot of humour, a lot of body language, a lot of colloquialisms. And... this morning the tech person was like "had a bad experience?" and I was like "yeah" and I HAVE! One time my USB stick didn't work but thank goodness I brought my whole laptop along which plugged in just fine. But usually I don't have bad experiences... because back when I was doing theatre I learned the value of tech rehearsals and since I treat talks as a performance I try to make sure as much as possible to have a "tech rehearsal" of some sort. It's just such a natural failsafe for me that... wow, I guess it isn't common sense.
But yeah, man, I guess timing one's own reading process is not a common thing because SO many people went over their 15 minutes. It drives me crazy, because it's just really rude. There were some people who were watching their clocks as they read and that drives me crazy too... to me it shows that the reader (and they're inevitably reading) doesn't know how to condense their paper enough to share it succinctly. They think EVERYTHING in their paper is necessary for understanding their core argument, and they're, well, wrong. Because at the end of it there's way too much to process, AND they're also reading this hella boring-ass academic language as well which doesn't work well auditorily.
Maybe I just don't get academic conferences.
ANYWAY. THE PANEL ROCKED.
I skedaddled right back to my department for the lunch with prospective grads and the grad-only meeting. It went OK. One of the prospective students opted to come with me back to the mini-conference and after that we had a brief campus tour. We were SO tired by then. I really just wanted to stay home and pass out, but instead headed home, got changed, and got a ride out to Dr. SD's house for what I think was really convivial party. I do think we could have done better than just Senate Faculty attending... either way, it was such a good time the faculty kept on exclaming how come we didn't do this more often.
I am here and ready to pass out and just needed to check my mail and ugghhhh students. COME ON. Fucking figure out this ish yourself for chrissakes, like, I already set aside two whole days and am planning to write my ass off this weekend so it won't interfere with the review sessions. Siiiiiiiiiiiiigh.
I managed to keep it together and used the afternoon to work on my paper some more and run errands and stuff. I also went to the Ethnic Studies Open House and holy shit they party. I met a lot of their prospective students and hung out with the grads I already knew from my seminars. It was such a good time! I stayed and helped clean up. They have a fucking fridge! A big one! And they had so much food we had to play fridge tetris! Gah!
Yesterday I finished the linguistics diagnostic, handled a CPLT GSA meeting, attended an emergency GSA Council meeting, managed to not go out of my mind with boredom during the lecture review session, survived the seminar (which was great because for some reason we kept on saying "So this is going to be on my paper tomorrow but"), and had a brief rehearsal with a classmate who's doing a script for the mini-conference and wanted to workshop it with her readers a bit. I requested that we be on the same panel too! All three of us had very similar things going on. It's a great script: Alexis Sherman in a waffle house with Seymour, a character he wrote and Pauline, a girl who wants him to make her a star. (It is, now that I think about it, basically Alexie Sherman RPF.) I'm reading Seymour. He was in The Business of Fancy Dancing? We were hoping to have the DVD playing in the background while we read, and rainycafe.com "cafe" sound effects for the ambience of being in a diner XDDDD Went home and made my powerpoint presentation. Yay pretty pictures!
Today was the day! Recruitment day + mini conference. Ridic packed. I got to the conference room at 8am (which means waking up at 6.30am, haugh) and Maurisa tried her laptop and I made sure my USB stick worked. I really wish I'd asked her to test out her planned presentation tech as well.... I'm going to make sure all my co-panelists test out their tech beforehand if I can help it. She forgot the DVD player so she didn't get to test it. Anyway, the tech changeover was not as smooth as I hoped. This makes me want to get my own baby laptop with all necessary programs and such so this will never happen again. It never fails to amaze me how people just don't know how to use their own tools! Panel after panel of people failing to understand how their own machines work.
Of course it was also panel after panel of people reading their goddamn too-long papers. Academics are usually terrible presenters, I find. I would like to say it's because we're grads, but no, I've yawned and napped my way through several boring ass lectures as well.
My panel was, IMHO, the best: we started with a presentation on the Polynesian Panthers, and then my indigenous steampunk presentation. The script reading went off well, even though we didn't get the DVD to work. Most other groups did close readings of text and theory stuff, and we did creative stuff. I think we were certainly the most vibrant group!
Reading and prepping for the script made me realize something else as well--I don't treat things like lectures, presentations and conference talks like they're... well, talks, you know, where you share shiny ideas. I treat it as a performance. My process usually involves a LOT of timed rehearsing of my script, writing down everything ahead of time, even the anecdotes I want to share (even though I improvise in how I tell them), and making sure I'm talking in a way that keeps people engaged.... so a lot of humour, a lot of body language, a lot of colloquialisms. And... this morning the tech person was like "had a bad experience?" and I was like "yeah" and I HAVE! One time my USB stick didn't work but thank goodness I brought my whole laptop along which plugged in just fine. But usually I don't have bad experiences... because back when I was doing theatre I learned the value of tech rehearsals and since I treat talks as a performance I try to make sure as much as possible to have a "tech rehearsal" of some sort. It's just such a natural failsafe for me that... wow, I guess it isn't common sense.
But yeah, man, I guess timing one's own reading process is not a common thing because SO many people went over their 15 minutes. It drives me crazy, because it's just really rude. There were some people who were watching their clocks as they read and that drives me crazy too... to me it shows that the reader (and they're inevitably reading) doesn't know how to condense their paper enough to share it succinctly. They think EVERYTHING in their paper is necessary for understanding their core argument, and they're, well, wrong. Because at the end of it there's way too much to process, AND they're also reading this hella boring-ass academic language as well which doesn't work well auditorily.
Maybe I just don't get academic conferences.
ANYWAY. THE PANEL ROCKED.
I skedaddled right back to my department for the lunch with prospective grads and the grad-only meeting. It went OK. One of the prospective students opted to come with me back to the mini-conference and after that we had a brief campus tour. We were SO tired by then. I really just wanted to stay home and pass out, but instead headed home, got changed, and got a ride out to Dr. SD's house for what I think was really convivial party. I do think we could have done better than just Senate Faculty attending... either way, it was such a good time the faculty kept on exclaming how come we didn't do this more often.
I am here and ready to pass out and just needed to check my mail and ugghhhh students. COME ON. Fucking figure out this ish yourself for chrissakes, like, I already set aside two whole days and am planning to write my ass off this weekend so it won't interfere with the review sessions. Siiiiiiiiiiiiigh.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-15 04:57 pm (UTC)Between stuff like that and the "read the paper verbatim in an obviously-reading-the-paper tone of voice" rule for so many other presenters... I'd love to figure out where the pattern started for those, because some on, people, really.