Attending an international academic conference in-person: meet, share and connect

Niles Zhao

I attended the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) Annual Conference in Pittsburgh from 18 to 22 March. It was my first time presenting at an in-person conference. Despite the uncertainties before the conference, I was able to meet friends, share my research, and connect with fellow applied linguists.

The conference was only five days but it took a lot of effort to make the trip happen. My paper was accepted by the conference in mid-October last year when Australia had not opened its borders at all. When the borders were first opened to Australian citizens, I knew it was a good sign. But soon came Omicron and opening to international students was delayed. Later, before I was able to exuberate over the news that international students could finally travel to the country, Australia recorded tens of thousands of cases and there was no guarantee whether the border policy would remain unchanged. Moving on to February, I started to worry about what would happen if I caught COVID and could not go or what if I caught COVID in the US and couldn’t come back to Australia. Careful as I was, it felt like a gamble. I only breathed a sigh of relief upon safely arriving in Melbourne. Nonetheless, it was a rewarding experience and it was worth all the trouble to attend the conference.

AAAL was definitely a good place to meet friends, old and new. At the registration desk, the volunteer looked very familiar to me but I couldn’t quite tell because of the mask. As soon as I told her my name, she exclaimed, ”Oh, you are Niles!” Then I remembered that we worked on two student committees (ILTA GSA and AALA SC) online for more than a year. There was also a staff member at the reception with whom I corresponded by email a lot recently but had never met in person.  

On the first conference day, I attended a colloquium. At the beginning, I sat in the back, knowing that I couldn’t stay there for the whole two hours because I needed to help a friend present remotely. Then, since I couldn’t see the slides clearly, I moved to the front. Only minutes after I sat down did I realise the person sitting on the same row a few empty seats away was another friend with whom I worked since the beginning of this year. Later during the conference, another friend told me that he was just a few rows behind us at that exact same colloquium. All the Zoom and Teams meetings were great in making it possible for people around the world to interact despite the pandemic, but the level of interaction could not possibly match that of an in-person experience. As I later wrote to that friend, people tended to appear serious on Zoom. It was only by meeting face-to-face that we got to know each other better and developed a real friendship.

The conference also provided an opportunity to make new friends. During the last coffee break, I stood by a table with five other people. The six of us represented universities from four countries (Australia, Austria, UK and US), while orignially coming from six different countries. We talked about our research and compared the different modes of PhD programes in different countries (they all agreed that the Australian mode is the most challenging one with both a coursework component and a tight timeline for completion). One of them is the student of a very well-known scholar whose books I just read recently. Coincidently, we were on the same bus to the airport and then the same flight from Pittsburgh to New York.

The main reason for me attending the conference was to present findings from my doctoral project. My presentation turned out to be much better than I thought. At first, I was quite nervous, not knowing what questions attendees would ask and whether I could respond properly. On the first conference day, I helped a friend who couldn’t come to the conference play her recorded presentation and there was no audience at all. In a mid-sized conference room with a capacity of 60 people, there was just me the whole time. Naturally, I started to worry what if no one showed up at mine. Fortunately, my presentation was well-attended and I received some interesting questions and constructive feedback. Most surprisingly, an editor of a top journal in my field attended my presentation. After my presentation, I talked with her briefly and she was very supportive upon hearing that I plan to publish a paper based on my presentation and commented that there is a lack of qualitative research in our field to give voices to under-represented groups.

AAAL was also a venue to enagage with people who share similar research interests and could become prospective collaborators. As PhD students, the projects we work on are usualy very specific and it is likely that no one in our home institutions conduct research on similar topics. At a conference with more than 1,400 applied linguists, however, you are almost certain to find someone researching a simliar topic. I met three such scholars at different occasions. We discussed the potential of future collaboration and considered organising a symposium next year.

The only pity of the trip was that it was too short and I couldn’t stay longer than the conference. As a matter of fact, I had only three hours to savour the early spring of Pittsburgh during the last day of the trip before boarding my 30-hour flight to the other end of the world.

Acknowledgements

My conference trip is financed by both internal and external funding. Internal funding comes from Graduate Research in Arts Travel Scheme. You can find the relevant information in this post. External funding is TIRF Doctoral Dissertation Grant and you can refer to this post for the application.