reprinted with permission
We’re Not Doing Enough for Grad Students at Conferences
Networking won’t save us, but we should endeavor to clear pathways instead of pulling up ladders or staying in our bubbles.
By Benjamin L. Carp
AUGUST 23, 2023
When I was a graduate student, I flew 3,000 miles to give my first conference presentation, only to be relegated to a grab-bag panel with six different papers on wildly divergent topics. The session struck me as dispiriting and useless — except that a world-renowned scholar in my field took it upon himself to stay for my paper and afterward sat outside with me for half an hour to provide a critique. I am a tenured professor now, but that kindness has stayed with me for more than 20 years.
In-person conferences are back, for better and for worse. Such gatherings can be exclusionary and costly for many junior scholars, not to mention inaccessible for people with disabilities and for those who live far from the usual conference venues. Yet conferences remain the standard way we congregate and converse. Get a few dozen — or a few hundred — scholars in the same location, and the potential for priceless social and intellectual interactions skyrockets. So long as conferences are happening somewhere, they will be important catalysts for career advancement.
For rookie and experienced attendees alike, there is no shortage of advice about how to make conferences work for yourself. But established scholars have a second obligation to make conferences work for others — for our own graduate students, especially, but also for other junior scholars we might encounter at a meeting. Recalling how I benefited from such serendipitous mentoring got me thinking: What should we do to help emerging scholars at conferences?
For academics, networking at professional meetings can lead to publications, future conference panels, and other avenues for making your intellectual mark. A senior professor from any institution can serve formally or informally as a reader of a junior scholar’s manuscripts. Sometimes networking can even pave the way to future employment, both within and beyond academe, through letters of recommendation, support for tenure and promotion, and informal referrals. In that sense, conferences are places of privilege, and it would be highly unfair for better-connected professors to hoard that privilege too closely.
For a fledgling graduate student, a scholarly conference can be both heady and daunting. So a positive interaction with an established professor is everything: Senior scholars can offer feedback to improve a dissertation chapter; they can be generous with their attention, and even a brief exchange has potential for further exchanges down the road.
Yet the gap between expectation and reality is wide for many graduate students. For example, after a recent conference, a doctoral candidate at my university reported that he had met students from other programs who felt that their advisers had shown an “unwillingness to help them network throughout the weekend.” Granted, not all advisers can attend every conference, and when they do, they want to see old friends or they have their own clout to chase. Maybe graduate students will always feel that their advisers could be doing more for them, no matter how much effort the professors expend.
Still, this complaint reminded me that, although much of conference mentoring can involve small-bore or even unthinking acts of kindness, such gestures matter in a profound way.
Tenured professors with long-standing friendships may have forgotten that conference attendees often feel alienated, excluded, lonely, or overwhelmed, particularly graduate students who are new and inexperienced. Established academics, whose conference fees and travel expenses are often paid by their institutions, also might forget the monetary sacrifice required of graduate students and job candidates to attend. In any case, that one professor at my first conference didn’t forget his responsibility to make the financial sacrifice worthwhile.
Networking can be a particular challenge at large conferences — like the annual meetings of the Modern Language Association or the American Historical Association — where almost all attendees feel invisible. But most subfields have smaller, more manageable meetups. Even more intimate are boutique conferences that often require some networking (or a particularly appealing project) just to get in the door.
The students who complained about their advisers were attending the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, a mid-sized conference that makes admirable efforts to forestall such dissatisfaction: It reduces registration fees for student attendees (the fee is zero when they present a paper); sponsors a graduate-student reception and special graduate research seminars; has recently started a diversity, equity, and inclusion program; and offers a post-meeting workshop online on how to turn a panel presentation into a published journal article.
At the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where I teach, our doctoral students in history get great practice in networking before they ever leave the nest. In addition to a well-organized student council and a peer-mentor program, CUNY graduate students belong to the university’s labor union when they serve as instructors and have seats at the table in program governance. The student-run seminar in my subfield invites presentations from our students as well as students and faculty members from other institutions. Students are also eligible for partial funding to attend conferences.
Such formal and institutional mechanisms are vitally important.
Yet an informal touch is necessary, too. Connections can make a big conference feel smaller while also broadening the networks of individual scholars. For instance, some graduate programs will organize a small breakfast or cocktail reception for faculty members, current students, and alumni. That is more of an internal network than an external one, but small networks can breed bigger ones. The key is to help students learn the unwritten rules of the profession and find an entree into the networks they need.
Even without prior planning, simple connection and reconnection are important. Among the many ways for senior professors to take the lead on this at a scholarly meeting:
Doctoral advisers should check in with all of the program’s current and recent students who are attending the conference. Pass on something interesting from a panel, point out a promising talk, or even just say hello.
Spend time talking with junior scholars about their scholarship — not just because they carry on, and challenge, their elders’ work, but because newbies to a profession sometimes need a low-stakes opportunity to join informal scholarly conversations.
Advisers should look out for one another’s mentees, too, perhaps cynically as deposits in the favor bank but also because of the Golden Rule.
There is something more memorable about fostering relationships in person. But senior scholars can obviously support and encourage younger scholars throughout the year, too, via the internet — by exchanging email addresses or scheduling a future virtual meeting.
Attend as many panels as possible where students from your program are presenting. Offer the students feedback. Even if your program’s students are just sitting in the audience, they might appreciate sitting near a professor so as to share reactions as the session ends, or even get an introduction to the panelists.
At the next level of intensity, professors can ask their advisees and mentees if there is anyone in the field they particularly want to meet. Then make the introductions: to journal editors, institutional players, wizened intellectuals, academic celebrities. It’s easier to be shamelessly pushy when it’s on an advisee’s behalf.
Additionally, if there is a small reception sponsored by a university press, library, or graduate program, ask to bring some graduate students along. Add extra spots to dinner reservations so that you and your peers can spontaneously invite a couple of students to follow you from a chaotic reception to a cozier meal. And when the bill arrives for the meal, coffee, or a bottle of water, plop down your wallet.
The easiest thing in the world would be to do all this in the service of old boys’ networks (or old networks of any gender). But the profession will never become more equitable or inclusive unless it can diversify the pipeline of junior scholars. When some senior professors are organizing conferences, looking for new work to publish, or offering job, program, and fellowship opportunities, the rest of us can make efforts to call attention to students from underrepresented groups.
Over time, it becomes possible to make deeper connections at conferences — the kind that go beyond brief interactions and allow younger scholars to ask external mentors for help with professional and personal crises. Even with former students who are happy and thriving, it’s nice to catch up and discuss advice about publishing, work-life balance, and other issues.
The jobs crisis in higher education, particularly in the humanities, is real, and it isn’t going away, but we are all in it together. Networking won’t save us, but we should endeavor to clear pathways instead of pulling up ladders or staying in our bubbles.
Our mentors and perhaps near strangers were kind to us many years ago, when we first started out. We can rarely repay them directly, but we can pass on their kindness with large and small gestures at conferences and beyond. Perhaps some advisers will stick to their “unwillingness to help,” but the rest of us can offer assistance, solidarity, and respect.
