I think I can break down most white collar jobs into the following categories:

1. People who produce relationships (for example, sales or recruiting)
2. People who produce things (usually products)
3. People who produce infrastructure (usually involving technology)
4. People who produce processes
5. People who produce information
6. People who produce decisions

These 6 categories are what I suspect “value” in business terms can be broken down into, and of course, we spend a lot of time trying to quantify that value using dollar amounts. How much you get paid is a function of how much value you’re perceived to produce. For example, it seems like society has decided that producing decisions is a high value activity.

I recently decided I wanted try presenting my work at an academic conference, so I had to write and submit an abstract for my proposed presentation. The problem, of course, was that I had no idea how to write a scientific abstract, which was a bit of a problem. Most of the advice I received and could find online was too vague for my taste, so I decided to take matters into my own hands and deconstruct some abstracts to see how those authors did it. And I’m really glad I did, because it was very enlightening.

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.

This is (almost) verbatim text from a journal entry I wrote for a seminar I took on immersive documentary. I thought it was interesting enough to put here, even though parts of it might not make sense if you haven’t read the works I’m talking about. For context, my class had previously read an essay called “Disaster City” by Barrett Swanson, in which Swanson participates in a disaster recovery simulation, explores his personal fascination with disaster scenarios, and explores the blurring between reality and fiction that occurs in those simulations. A lot of our conversation had to do with rituals and performative preparedness and how they can be used to enable cognitive avoidance of the root causes of certain issues, creating a false sense of safety for the person practising (or even observing) the rituals.

You know the drill. In the last episode I did of this series, I said the next one would be coming shortly, huh?

Yeah, right. I lied. These come out when they come out.