Conference Reflection: SIGCSE 2019 - "What I will do next time" (Part 3 of 3)

So given what did and did not go well, this section outlines three things that will hopefully make things better next time. The first is an overarching career task that will help me articulate my priorities, which will help me make decisions more quickly. The second is my first attempt at a travel routine that will hopefully help me better sustain myself both during and after an event. And the third is my plan on how to prepare for conferences, so I get the most out of them.

Articulate my "Professor Platform"

To help me prioritize and quickly assess an opportunity, I want to think on my "Professor Platform." I got this idea from "The Professor is In: The Essential Guide To Turning Your Ph.D. Into a Job" by Karen Kelsky. I read this book when I was job hunting. It describes the need to create a "Campaign Platform" to help frame how to present yourself to search committees. Moreover, it helps you have a set of "things about you" you can consistently use, which will then hopefully be adopted by others. I believe this conceptual framework is also useful as a professor.

Moreover, to help me better scope this platform, I want to constrain my thinking by using one of The National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity (NCFDD) strategies for dealing with service overload: "Think Of Your Career As A Book With Many Chapters." The job of a professor is complex and involves a lot of responsibilities and priorities. Moreover, these responsibilities and priorities change throughout one's career (like any job really). Hence I need to think in terms of chapters, so I'm not overwhelmed by the time span I am considering nor all the things I want to do someday. If I constrain myself to think in terms of the first 3-8 years of my career, this focuses me on what I need to do to establish myself as a professor that teaches well and has a productive scholarly cycle.

I use the term "scholarly cycle" deliberately because (1) I am a professor of the practice at Duke and am evaluated differently, my teaching is my main priority, and my scholarly work is more broadly defined than only research and (2) while I do want to do research, I want to include in my metric for success work that includes outreach and raising awareness of good pedagogy.

So to create this platform for my early career self, I plan to spend some time thinking about it. To help keep myself accountable, I plan to aim for an early-career grant that will force me to articulate my research platform and maybe insert my outreach and awareness work as part of my broader impacts.

Create and follow a travel routine

Since this is the first time I'm creating such a routine, I'm going to acknowledge to myself now that it is not going to be perfect. However, I'm going to make my first attempt at it and then slowly modify it until it works for me. This means I need to (1) state my goals to measure how well my plan works, (2) work backward to design a plan, (3) identify ways my plan may not work and plan accordingly, and (4) spend time after my first attempt at this routine to reflect on how it went. So with that, below is the result of steps 1-3 and I'll write a separate post of step 4 after the first attempt at executing this plan.

My goals are:
  1. Continue the health maintenance that I usually do when I'm at home
    1. Sleep an average of 7.5 hours
    2. Exercise 5 days out of 7
  2. Be present at the event(s)
  3. Develop my intellectual community and network
These goals are at odds because my past behavior has clearly had me sacrifice my health for the event(s) and networking. But I'm putting these in this order for a reason. My health is priority #1, but it has clear metrics to confirm when I've achieved them so it will hopefully be straightforward to know when I can focus on goal #2.

So given my goals, I think the following will be the first attempt at a routine, the rationale as to why will follow.
  1. Hotel Arrival: Check out the gym and decide if I will do a simple bodyweight workout in my room or use the gym
  2. Morning Routine: Requires waking up 1.5-2.5 hours before the start of the event, depending on event location and whether it serves breakfast
    1. 30 minutes - Workout
    2. If hotel gym: Weights and 15 minutes of treadmill
    3. If hotel room: Fitbit Coach app bodyweight workout or something on YouTube
      1.  I have a Fitbit and I love it. The Fitbit Coach app allows one free workout a week, which fits my current needs, but if I ever consistently needed more I would definitely pay for the membership.
    4. 1 hour - Shower, hair, makeup
    5. 30 minutes - Breakfast
    6. 30 minutes - Travel to event
  3. Night Routine: Requires 1 hour
    1. 20 minutes - Wrap up from the day
      1. Notes from people I met
      2. Reflection
      3. Add any tasks that need to be done to Trello
    2. 30 minutes - Get ready for bed
    3. 10 minutes - Rest and relaxation
I plan to workout in the morning because the best way to get myself to do something difficult is to do it first thing in the morning. Therefore, until working out becomes such a routine I could do it any time, I need to do it first thing in the morning. My night routine is probably too short. I don't think I've ever gone to bed within an hour of arriving in my hotel room unless it was very late and I was super tired. It takes me at least 30 minutes, or often an hour, to unwind at home. Hopefully, the unusual environment will help me change my need for this.

Now that I've established my routines, here is how I'll achieve goal #2:
  1. Meals and breaks are for meeting people.
  2. Schedule a "me time" break.
The first item is to take the guesswork out of how I will spend my meals and breaks. In the past, I've vacillated so much on what to do. I ended up spending energy on making a decision rather than meeting people. However, I am also an introvert, and while I'm an outgoing introvert, I still need time to recharge my batteries to sustainably make it through a day, which is why the second item is there. I'm defining a "me time" break as I need to plan a time where I will "hide" from everyone and cannot be interrupted. Most likely, this will be in my room if possible. If my room is not easy to reach, I will plan to spend time by myself on my laptop and be unapologetic about disengaging from everyone. This break can be during a meal or break.

The biggest obstacle to sticking to my plan will be FOMO. However, to achieve my goals, the math is what it is! I need 1 hour at night, 8 hours of sleep, and 1.5-2.5 hours in the morning that is a total of 10.5-11.5 hours, which means only 12.5-13.5 hours to spend on the event. Looking at that number, it feels like both a lot and so little. The most likely scenario for FOMO will be going out to dinner and wanting to stay late and hang out, rather than starting my night routine. My current ideas for getting around this are:
  • Remind myself that I'll have done event stuff for 12.5-13.5 hours by the end of dinner! That's plenty for a day.
  • Set an alarm for when I should leave, maybe even a 10-15 minute warning.
  • Buddy up, find someone else that wants to go back to the hotel at a specific time and make plans to go back together.
  • Tell a joke that while cheesy is technically true and will take the bite out of my feeling like I'm leaving everyone and missing out
    • "My bedtime is X" or "I'll be a very unhappy person tomorrow, which will likely include feeling like I'm holding on by my fingernails."
    • I need to take advantage of the fact that I get to sleep without my toddler nearby!

Prepare for a conference like I would any other project

Information and priorities dramatically increase the probability that I'll get something beneficial when going to a conference. My professor platform will help with priorities, preparing for a conference in advance will help with the information needs. I already know how to accomplish a project, I just never considered preparing for a conference as an actual project. But now that I think I do here is my plan:
  1. As soon as I plan to go to a conference:
    1. Block out the necessary time for the conference itself in my calendar
    2. Block out time to prepare for it in my calendar
    3. Create a card in my Trello to plan how I will prepare the Monday 2 weeks before the conference
  2. The week before the conference
    1. Go through the proceedings and read the abstracts of interesting looking papers
    2. Download all the papers I want to process into Mendeley
    3. Process these papers (At some point I'll write a blog post on what I mean by "process a paper")
  3. A few days before the conference
    1. Email the authors of the papers I found interesting about how I liked their paper, any questions I have, and a request to meet

Conclusion

So that's my plan. I'm posting this here on my blog as my public attempt to keep myself accountable. In fact, I'm posting it now because I'm going to a workshop this week, so my travel routine will get its first test run shortly. If you see me out and about, feel free to ask me how things are going given this post: I'd be happy to chat. It'll beat talking about the weather at least.

And what about you? If you've made it this far, I'd assume that at least some of these issues are in your own thoughts. What do you think? Any ideas on how things could be better? Or experiences you'd like to share? Please feel free to leave a comment, send a tweet, or drop me an email if you want something more private.

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