Your argument is promising – it just needs to be reorganized.
In Spring Quarter, MAPH is hosting a pair of conferences, both of which will provide you with (1) a new perspective on your thesis and invaluable feedback for your revision process; (2) practice presenting your work in distilled form and fielding questions, which is an important skill for up-and-coming academics, and also extremely useful in the job market. Read on for details!
MAPH Works in Progress Conference
Friday 5/2, 12:00-4:00
The Works in Progress Conference is your opportunity to present your thesis research to an audience of MAPH peers. Presenters are organized into panels based on a theme, and you’ll have 15 minutes to present your ideas, followed by questions from the audience. Obviously, you won’t be just reading your thesis off a page – that is super boring and inefficient. Instead, we’ll help you find ways to present your work so as to make it both accessible and interesting to a panel audience (see below).
CONVENIENTLY, this event takes place right around the same time that you should be receiving thesis feedback from your advisor – so by the end of the weekend, you should have two sets of comments that you can use in your revisions. It’s also, if you haven’t discovered this already, really fun to learn about what other people are working on and to hear their (usually completely unexpected) perspectives on your work. By this point in the quarter, it may feel like the thesis process is slowly funneling you down into narrower and narrower conversations. This is your chance to resurface, at least for an afternoon, into a wider intellectual world.
If you’d like to present your work at the WIPC, send a proposal (max. 500 words) to Sarah by Friday, April 18, at noon. * Update: The deadline is now Monday, April 21 at noon!
MAPH Conference Conference
Friday 4/25, 11:00-2:00
In preparation for the WIPC (or any other conference that you may want to present at), we’ve put together a Conference on Conferences. The Conference Conference will start at 11:00 on Friday morning with a workshop on How to Write a Conference Paper, then a break for lunch, and a panel in the afternoon on How to Give a Talk.
The panel is open to all MAPH students, but we have limited space in the workshops – so if you’re interested, come by and get your name on the signup sheet in the MAPH office. In addition, please send us a short paragraph on your thesis and your goals for the workshop, also by Friday, April 18, at noon, so that we can plan the workshop groups accordingly.