Choose Your Own Conference

When I was questing for a tenure-track job in a (mostly) traditional academic discipline, it was easy to know which conferences you should be going to: you started with your national or international professional organization’s annual conferences, moved through the regionals, and then targeted conferences around your specific niche. This is, of course, an oversimplification, but after years of implicit and explicit messaging during graduate school and beyond, knowing which conferences to go to (or rather, which conferences one should be going to) was easy enough.

It was also easy enough to prioritize based on a cost-benefit analysis – which conference(s) in any given year gives me the most bang for my buck?

It’s not so clear anymore which conferences I should be attending. It’s a question I’ve been particularly grappling with now that I’ve changed careers: how do I decide what conferences I should attend? How do I find new conferences? And how do I re-learn all of the cultural markers around which conferences are “important” and why, and use that information to make a cost-benefit analysis?

One of the challenges is that my new role intersects two areas of research and interest: faculty development and digital pedagogy. As my network (via Twitter and elsewhere) expands to include established practitioners in these two groups, I’m learning about which conferences are available (although often too late). But I’m having trouble figuring out which ones to prioritize (and to prioritize to my superiors who provide the funding).

How do you find and prioritize conferences?

Photo “Choices” by Flickr user Kyle Pearce / Creative Commons licensed BY-SA-2.0