Look, I’ve watched so many terrible presentations at this point that I couldn’t put off writing this anymore, so here, have this imagined Q&A. If you feel attacked by any of these questions, I’m sorry. I’m nicer in real life, I promise. In my defence, this post was meant to be sort of tongue in cheek, and it’s not targeted at anyone in particular.

If you want straight advice (read: you don’t want to wade through the sarcasm), I have other posts about this topic, which you can read here.

This article exists because at least three people have asked me this question already and I want some place to which I can point them. Maybe I’ll eventually write a less tongue-in-cheek post about how and why I blog, but for now, you get this.

I think the best thing to do as an undergrad at a conference is to be observant, since it’s pretty low-stakes at that point. Part of doing this is to see how academics interact to see whether or not you want to do this. What do people wear, how do they speak, what do they talk about, etc.

1. If you can, ask questions of the speakers after talks! Asking good questions during sessions is powerful (it gets you noticed!)¹

2. There seems to be a rough heuristic that you have to be a decent-ish speaker to become a professor.² (Virtually all of the professors I listened to were strong speakers; the grad students and post docs were a mixed bag.)

3. If you can, introduce yourself to people and join conversations; try to fully be a participant.

For context, these are some things I learned in the process of putting together and delivering a guest lecture to a first-year discrete math course last summer. The talk was about the research I was doing at the time, and I was allotted about half an hour for the presentation. Again, I meant to write and post this last year, but clearly that didn’t happen.

I really meant to put this list up sometime last fall… whoops. (This is yet another incredibly overdue article.) Anyway, here are a whole bunch of things I learned while attempting to “do research” last summer, whatever that means. The big theme here is to make life easier for future you, who will have to wrangle together your several months of chaos and exploration into a rigorous and coherent narrative. Present you can help by being organized and breaking things down into smaller, documentable steps.