I’ve been jokingly referring on Twitter to my self-imposed “Scholar Frosh” — re-habituating myself to the demands of academic life in order to mentally prepare myself for starting my master’s program. Today is a small milestone: I submitted my first proposal to a peer-reviewed conference. Its proceedings will be published online. I had two people look over the proposal itself, and I’ve discussed the research I want to undertake with about three or four people over the last couple months.
I found some help online about the conference proposal conference — Educause has a good, compact podcast featuring conversations with conference organizers and proposal reviewers talking about what makes a good proposal.
I’m going to start the research and discuss the results here on my blog regardless of whether the proposal’s accepted or not, largely because the experience of doing the research is something I want for myself anyway. I have a slight, sinking fear that this may be the first proposal of many others I will submit in the next couple of years, just to make sure I feel like I’ve done as much as I can to go to conferences that I can get really stoked about.
Next time I do this, I definitely want to feel more confident about who I can turn to, to help me read it over and to clarify my thinking, because I don’t want to tap out the awesome, wonderful people who read my paper this time around! This is the “networking with peers” skill that I’ve never quite nailed down. But I think I can also feel confident that the people who help me read over my proposals don’t necessarily have to understand all of what I’m proposing, in order to tell me whether I’ve presented it in an intellectual provocative, appropriately-scoped way.
Now for the fun stuff — starting the research.
