More Motivators to Do a Great Conference Presentation
I'd like to riff off what Collin says in a recent post about conference presentations. He suggests that conference presentations are not taken very seriously by some who do them, and that one way to think of them would be to prepare our presentations as though the people in the audience paid their own money (no reimbursement by their institutions) to be there. Conference travel is expensive, and it's terrible to offer up a lousy presentation in exchange for that.
That, to me, is a good motivator to prepare well for presentations (well, that and the fact that I have done two presentations in the past that didn't go well at all, and I don't want to have to suffer that embarrassment again). But I can think of other motivators:
1. Do your presentation as if there's someone in the audience who has been wanting to meet you for a long time now (months or even years).
2. Do your presentation as though recruitment scouts (for publishing opportunities, jobs, PhD programs, etc.) are in the audience.
3. Assume that there's at least one blogger in the audience and that if you don't do a well-researched, thoughtful, and eloquent presentation, that person is going to write a bad review of your presentation. Assume the person's blog has a high enough Google page rank that the review could show up on the first page of results in a search for your name.
Comments
In order of likelihood
#3 is probably more likely than any of the other reasons either you or I supplied...
My own motivations
I agree that #3 is probably the most likely, but strangely, I didn't even think of it before I headed for NCA. #2 was the motivation I used most explicitly, even in an actual conversation with my mother:
"Tom, this conference seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through, to say nothing of the money involved. Are you sure you want to do this?"
"Absolutely. Hey, some of the people listening to me might be people who can hire me later."
"Well, yes ... but will they remember you in four years?"
Okay, so much for that idea.
But this one has a corollary:
It's expensive for the people presenting, too, not all of whom have their expenses completely covered. And I didn't want to spend that much time and money on an activity I didn't take seriously. It amazes me that other people do.
Two Cultures