hail the conquering hero!

So this weekend I went to Lafayette (laff-ee-yet), Louisiana for a conference on Language and Literature, where gave a presentation about the research I did for my Master's thesis. I rented a car here in Denton and drove down (about 7 hours) on Friday, presented my paper on Saturday, and drove back again on Sunday. I was really nervous about it, but knew it was something I had to do to start getting used to presenting my research, start getting my name out there, and work my way around in the world of Academia. In the end, it was a really good experience for me, and I'm very glad I went.

The conference was quite a bit smaller than I had anticipated. I knew it wouldn't be that large, but there were only about 60 people there in all, I'd say. That meant that during my panel, only about 12 people were in the audience. I was very OK with that. I was the only person there to do a PowerPoint presentation at all, which surprised me. Most of the other students there were working on degrees in English, Rhetoric, or Folklore, and apparently these disciplines still just read their paper from the lectern. I, on the other hand, didn't even stand behind the lectern at all, and I used the computer for my notes, and didn't even have a fully-written paper with me. In fact, right before the panel started, I got super worried that I might not be able to get the computer to work and would have to just do the presentation from memory. I had written up an outline in a Word document as back-up ... but I had never printed one out to use, so that would have been a problem.

Anyway ... to make a long story short ("too late!"), the presentation went very well. People seemed fairly interested, although there weren't any questions for me (or for anyone else -- there was very little time left). I got to talking with the guy who presented before me, and it turned out he was also Mormon, so we bonded on that level. We sat by each other for lunch, which was right afterward (Mom asked me later if he was single, cute, nice, etc ... oh, those moms!). Almost as soon as I got into the room where they fed us lunch, one of the professors came over to ask me some things about the computer program I had used for my research. While I was talking with him, one of the other professors came over and said he was hoping to sit by me and ask me some more questions about this research. And, in one of the afternoon sessions, someone told me that he had really enjoyed my PowerPoint presentation, that it had just the right amount of information to keep him interested and engaged, but not so much that it was overwhelming. So all in all, it went very well.

Dr. Rice, who talked to me during lunch, also reminded me of just what a unique position I'm in. He mentioned, first of all, what a small area stylistics is in the US, which in many ways is a huge advantage to me. He also got talking about the unusual combination of interests it takes to do corpus stylistics, since you have to have an interest in computers, analysis, and mathematical things, but also in literature, language, and art. And he also brought up the point that that is a very marketable combination of skills, since they are necessary for a lot of jobs in, for example, information mining and other software-related jobs. One of the many reasons why I think I need to do more with computer-y stuff.

OK ... Erin also wants me to talk about the time, a couple of weeks ago, when I was going home for Easter. After we got on the road (and Erin was gracious enough to drive me down to Dallas to the airport), I realized that I had no idea what gate I needed, or what flight number I was on, or even the airline. I had to call about 5 people before I got hold of our friend Matt, who looked up the info for me. I had taken my confirmation number, but I forgot to look at any of the other stuff. Oops. Lucky for me, I still made it.

The last quote was from Stan Freberg's "The United States of America."

Never confuse efficiency with a liver complaint. (82 points)

P.S.: As you can see, I have also changed my template. Time for a change. I am still working on getting my sidebar content staightened out, so you'll have to bear with me for a while.