Conferences and the Afterlife of Grad School
Where you go influences where you'll sit and who you'll sit next to
It’s August, and for political scientists that means it’s time to confront the kickoff of conference season. The American Political Science Association annual meeting, held Labor Day(ish), is the first major conference of a cycle that will take researchers to hotel bars in cities around the continent and the world, depending on your standing and research budget.
Like any circuit, you tend to see the same people at conferences. People work on similar projects and so they go to similar panels; they work in similar disciplines and so they go to similar meetings. Over time, ideally, this means conferences—even the largest, like APSA, with thousands of attendees—no longer become big, scary places but rather small ones. Six thousand people may attend the APSA annual meeting, but only a few hundred or a couple dozen will go to your annual meeting.
Set aside the questions about whether it’s all worth it or where the conferences should be held; it’s been nearly six weeks since social media relitigated those discussions and I hope we can invoke estoppel on them for another six weeks. I want instead to offer some advice and reflections about what the conference circuit illuminates for decisions that researchers make when they enter the discipline or even before. Specifically, I want to argue that the often-made observation that people like going to conferences because they get to see their grad-school friends offers an unusually frank and revealing truth about why early choices are important.
When a grad student starts going to disciplinary conferences (not the small ones, but the big imperial ones), they’ll want to visit with people they know. Those will, naturally, be people from the same doctoral program. And for the first few years, those cohorts will (or should!) support each other and provide a natural network to help socialize students.
That isn’t what the “hanging out with grad school friends” observation is about. Rather, the observation is made about folks who are already established. And it’s made in a tone that suggests that the senior scholars are only interested in conferences not for the purest ideals of Science but rather because conferences are social sites.
Ah, the horror, to imagine that scholars might want their workplaces to be something more than austere, severe monasteries that hold few people dear.
There’s a lot of truth to the observation. Watch the hotel bars and coffeeshops and you’ll see people, indeed, catching up with their friends and colleagues from their squandered twenties. This should, however, suggest a few observations in turn:
You’ll be working with and around people from graduate school for decades. Adjust your behaviors accordingly!
After you all leave, you will get to see each other something like once or twice a year at a maximum. Graduate cohorts are brought together and then dispersed. Graduate school friendships and comradeships are intense and formed on the basis of weird internal experiences (I still know with whom I worked on stats problem sets, and that still matters). And yet the structure of the industry is such that these ties will be weakened really fast just as you make a transition from student to faculty. Congratulations, here’s an academic job, now you have no friends.
The impact of graduate school is more than just (“just”) training and credentials. Once you leave graduate school, those colleagues and faculty will still be the foundation of your academic networks—even if you’ve done everything right and have made connections beyond your home institution. As a result, people who attended schools where their colleagues will get jobs in the biz and hang around for decades will be advantaged not just on the job market but for decades afterward.
This last point is one that’s a little harder to grasp when a 23 or 24-year-old is deciding where to go to Ph.D. school. And yet that decision influences research networks for decades. Moving down the tiers of doctoral programs makes it steadily less likely that, even if a given graduate student wins the job-market lottery, their colleagues will as well.
The accumulative advantage of networking is nontrivial. It’s a substantial accelerator for careers and work, and although initial disadvantages can be overcome that’s not exactly a boost to a career so much as an additional hindrance. Thinking about the long afterlife of those late-night sessions coding R or debating Waltz is a good way to understand the glacial pace of the academic career.