PhD stories: preparing a conference panel

Part of PhD studies is going, and participating, in conferences. You can present a paper, or you can hold a panel - the latter is today's topic!

Back in August, a colleague of mine suggested that we work on presenting a panel for a conference in 2020. Having never done a panel before, I thought this would be a great opportunity to see what it's like, so of course I jumped on board!

Her idea quickly gathered momentum amongst our university group, and so began the time to coordinate. We had a few meetings between August and October to discuss our topic, how to link our talks together under one umbrella theme, etc... 

We began by looking into the conference we wanted to present at. On their website, we found previous years' presentations and panels, so we gathered the themes, talks and presenters of the past 3 years to see if there was a pattern as to what gets picked, if there is a recurring theme over the years, and if our potential topic could fit. 

Doing this helps figure out the best way to write your abstract and pitch your presentation for a particular conference - think of it as a job interview: the more you know about your potential employer, the more chance you have to answer workplace-related questions properly.

During our second meeting, we began defining our topic and theme. Because we all come from very different backgrounds, and we want to talk about different things under the same theme, we had to decide what each of us individually was interested in, and how to connect it to the others' interests. As others joined, we had to continue doing this process with more people, more interests, more topics. this is probably one of the more challenging parts if your group is diverse in backgrounds and range! 

After we came up with the identifying theme, it was time to define research questions and to work on individual abstracts. We each wrote a short abstract about our individual presentations, which would later be put together into one common abstract. 

We also secured a presentation in another seminar, to test-run our ideas with experts on the umbrella theme we picked. 

One of us worked on the common abstract first, then we brainstormed it and re-worked it to be longer, more accurate and most importantly, more academic. From here on out, we'll be re-working it a little before the abstract deadline, and we're good to go!