The Grad School Diaries: At the Party

I’ve been in larger ballrooms than this one, and I’ve been in spaces that were more crowded than this, but I can’t ever remember being in a space this large that was also this jammed with people. A least the food is good. They told us that the Italians throw a good party, and they weren’t kidding…

I’m in Chicago for the Academy of Management Conference, the second week of August, 2009. There are a number of professional organizations associated with business faculty, but the Academy is the biggest one; there are people here from both the micro (Organizational Behavior) and macro (Strategic Management) sides of Management, plus folks from Marketing, Supply Chain, Logistics, Information Technology, Finance, and a dozen other fields. Each day there are literally hundreds of individual sessions, with panel discussions of various topics and dozens of scholar presenting original research papers to the assembled delegates. It’s all just a little overwhelming…

Up until now, the largest professional conference I’ve ever attended was the J. Lloyd Eaton Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, to which I presented a paper in 1986. The Eaton Conference is not a large gathering, even now; in 1986 there were just over 30 speakers for the entire event, and we were all using a single lecture hall at the University of California, Riverside campus. This year’s Academy meetings take up all of the conference rooms and ball rooms in four large hotels in downtown Chicago, and just knowing which building to be in on any given day is a challenge. And as previously noted, I know maybe a dozen of the 8,000 plus people who are here…

I quickly noticed that most of the faculty (and the older graduate students) aren’t paying that much attention to the official sessions anyway; unless there’s someone you know (personally or by reputation) or whose work you find especially interesting presenting a paper, you really can’t hope to take much of it in. As it turns out, the real attraction of these meetings is the parties…

Most of the larger and better funded business schools are throwing some kind of bash during the Academy meetings. Some of these are out of reach – UCLA holds theirs at a steakhouse, for example, and they don’t provide free food to party-crashers. I don’t know what it would take to get an invitation to that party, but apparently being a completely unknown first-year doctoral student from a rival business school isn’t it. But on the other side of things, you have open-to-all-comers events, like the ones being thrown by the National University of Singapore, the event being hosted by the Australia-New Zealand Academy of Management (ANZAM), and this one, which is being thrown by one of the big Italian universities…

In the future, I expect my experience at the Academy meetings will be different from this one. Next year I may not attend; I’ll be busy studying for Comprehensive exams in September. By the following year, though, I’m going to try to submit a paper for consideration; maybe I’ll even get to present it at the 2011 Academy meeting, wherever that turns out to be. And the following year, as a fourth-year student, I’ll be looking for people from schools I’d like to interview at; trying to convince someone to interview me for my dream job as a professor – or at least, something that offers a living wage and a reasonable shot at tenure in a location I can stand living in for long enough to get that far…

It took me a while to realize that this is a learning experience too; that coming to these meetings is encouraged by the Department and the School because it’s the only way to learn how to move in these circles, relate to these people, and answer the increasingly difficult questions about what you want to study – and what theory or theories make you think there might be some point in studying that. Someday soon, the critical skills for my entire cohort will not be statistical or mathematical analysis, but rather how well we can convince total strangers that were are both fun people to have around and potentially useful assets to their institution. I’ve had more practice at this type of social interaction than most of the others, and I might have some advantages in terms of speaking well, telling good stories, and knowing just a little about stand-up comedy, but there’s no doubt that I need the practice…

Someday soon, events like this may well take on a life-or-death importance to all of us. For now, though, I’m going to go and get more of this flank steak…