(Virtual) SIGCSE TS 2021 Reflection

The SIGCSE Technical Symposium 2021 happened! So that means it’s time for a conference reflection. However, this blog post is going to be a little different. I’m going to try writing a letter to my future self focusing on how the conference went and how I can do online conferences better in the future.

[Also posted on medium.]

Dear Future Self,

So you are planning to attend another online conference. And I know there are online conferences in your future because you got a paper accepted to ITiCSE. And then ICER and Grace Hopper are both online (Wow, writing that makes me realize that we attend more conferences than I thought.). You’ve done a few online conferences now, so it’s time to remember what happened last time and learn the lessons from them. We don’t want to repeat the “I’m up to my eyeballs in work!” experience. Especially considering we wrote an entire blog post about attending two conferences at once, ICER and Learning@Scale (are we going to Learning@Scale this year?), and a whole series on how to better tackle in-person conferences pre-pandemic. This letter is for the sake of having the highlights in one place.

First, let’s remember your primary goals. You want to see, meet, and reconnect with people. You also want to learn about new work. However, connecting with people takes precedence over learning new work because you can always read the paper later (or hopefully watch the video about it). After all, as Amy Ko says in her SIGCSE reflection post, one of the most valuable things about conferences is creating relationships.

So what do you need to do to have a successful conference? As always, plan! But how? First, plan when you will do what because this isn’t going to be a typical week! And do not think you can do a “normal workweek” and just shove the conference in the cracks. Treat it like you are actually flying on a plane and staying at a hotel for a few days. You wouldn’t try doing a typical week’s worth of work if you were doing that! As for what to plan: (1) How/when will you meet people? (2) Which events do you want to make sure to go to live (maybe posters, Birds of a Feather, virtual gatherings, or a paper where you want to ask a question)? (3) When will you have personal time where you are taking a break and aren’t working? Yes, at least one small child will be at daycare during the day, but that doesn’t mean you have to work while they are gone. Remember you will likely be taking time outside of regular work hours to be at this conference, don’t just tack that on as extra work hours in a day. If you do, you’ll have no R&R time and become a stressed-out, short-tempered monster! Also, plan for FOMO, just like we talked about in our in-person conference blog post.

Speaking of activities outside of regular work hours, you should decide in advance if you can go to those. You need R&R, but you also need to manage your FOMO. Make sure to block out time to be with family, put the kids to bed, and decompress from the day. Let’s also acknowledge you will sacrifice your sleep. You want to make the most of things, but parenting duties are forever, and you’ll either decompress strategically or via revenge bedtiming yourself. Knowing that, let’s be strategic, okay? Experiment and then reflect on it, and hopefully, you’ll do better at the following conference. Be willing to try a “radical” experiment. Remember, you need around an hour to decompress before bed (your spring semester theme is teaching you this) — plan for it. And socializing is not decompression time. You tried it during SIGCSE and stayed up late anyway.

Besides planning your time during the conference, plan for things before. Block out time when you’ll at least go through the proceedings and read abstracts of papers. And keep to that time! For SIGCSE, you aspired but quickly overwrote that time with teaching. For example, you could do it during your daily reading practice and maybe also daily writing practice. ITiCSE at least is in the summer. ICER is on the cusp of the start of the fall semester. While Grace Hopper is during the semester. So you’ve got a few conferences to experiment with getting yourself to do what you need to do, to feel like you are prepared for the conference before it starts.

Finally, plan for how you will consume the content you didn’t get to during the conference. We’ve incorporated SIGCSE content into your daily reading, which is going pretty well. So that might be a plan going forward. By the time you read this though, you’ll know better than I. I will remind you that you didn’t make a plan for Grace Hopper 2020 and ended up never going back to that.

To close, well, I don’t want to end this with just lecturing at you. So I’ll go with, you can do this! You aren’t good at attending online conferences yet. But remember the “yet” in the sentence. Keep trying and experimenting until you find a formula that works. You did reasonably well with your pre-pandemic plan. It just requires some reimagining and trying again.

Love,

Kristin

PS: Despite the difficulty, you are having with online conferences. They are still pretty nice. Especially considering you weren’t planning on going to any for a while due to small children at home. The pandemic forcing them online actually enabled you to go. So here’s hoping they have their place as we transition out of the pandemic.

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