I’ve been to quite a number of conferences in my time. The same goes for working groups, seminars, symposia, and the occasional public-private convention. In fact, I still go to some now and then, remaining connected in a vestigial way to academia, like some poor animal’s appendix that just hasn’t quite rotted out. The travel, if there is that aspect, can be fun, but the conference scene itself is its own beast, one that newcomers — often undergraduate students who’ve lucked into a promising research project — tend to approach with undeserved trepidation.
Because on the one hand, no one seems to care; but on the other, everyone seems to really, really care. An organized session can pass the time in languor, with neither presenter nor listeners quite aware of the topic being discussed, only to suddenly escalate into a heated argument over whether an 80 basis point step-up in the policy rate is quite as severe as a 75. Over the years, I’ve compiled the following tactical deflections — defensive gambits, if you will — that appear to be in every conference presenter’s toolbox. These are super-special escape hatches one is bound to use when cornered by an attendee who has *gasp* actually read the same literature.
These gambits, like video game cheat codes, more typically get invoked during the Q&A session that invariably follows any talk, but they can and will be used during the talk itself as the need arises. It should be noted that I don’t have hard data on this, so we list down these gambits in no particular order.
1. Appeal to the Absent Adviser
Often used by undergraduate or new graduate students when attending a conference where their adviser could not put together either the funding or the bother to show up. When asked a hard-hitting question by the session chair or a surprisingly attentive member of the audience for which the student is absolutely unprepared, the student points to some arbitrary empty corner of the room (supposedly where their adviser would have been sitting) and insists they would be the one to know. Unfortunately, they’re not here, so *shrugs shoulders* sorry about that.
“The standard deviation you’re seeing here is computed from the total value of the loan portfolio of the chosen bank. Oh — book value or market value? Hm, I’m inclined to say market value — ” the questioner immediately shakes their head in disapproval, putting the student on the defensive “— but my adviser knows the definition more completely. I just can’t quite recall it now.”
Surprisingly, it works every time because, what are you going to do? Buy them a flight ticket?
2. Appeal to the Absent Student
Number (1) is not limited to students. In fact, this excuse is also very — if not more — commonly deployed by their advisers. If the funding only permits one person to register for the conference, wouldn’t it be better for the adviser to go and present all their students’ papers? Unfortunately, that means so many different experimental protocols are swimming together in the overwhelmed mind of the poor non-tenured professor.
Asked the same question by their audience — this time in a more hard-hitting manner because they made the mistake of attaching the “Ph.D.” after their name on the byline — the professor makes a similar gesture to said empty corner. A little bit lower this time, ostensibly imagining their student to be cowering under the refreshments table at that exact moment, they say:
“The standard deviation you’re seeing here is computed from the total value of the loan portfolio of the chosen bank. Oh — book value or market value? Hm, I’m inclined to say market value —” the questioner slams their hand on the table, shaking everyone else in the room back to partial wakefulness “— but my student performed the calculation and I can’t quite recall what they used exactly. Yes, I know the market value won’t be regularly published! Yes, I’ve read Xu et al.!”
3. The Statute of Limitations
A professor who delegates the task of knowing to their advisee looks weak, especially if said professor obtained their Ph.D. before the Y2K panic, current tenure status be damned. A new assistant or adjunct professor who forgets minor definitions in the swamp of grant proposals, standing committee minutes, and the endless churn of class syllabi is tragic. But an associate professor who has the service of TAs and sleepless grad students bears higher expectations. They can’t just forget, especially if it’s a study that’s meant to be part of their primary body of work.
Unless time is involved. When asked by the panel to defend their definition of a time period effect and whether a sensitivity analysis would have revealed the appropriateness of this choice, I’ve seen many a bespectacled professor wave their hands in the air, motioning not to the imagined coordinates of an absent student, but to the ether of time long passed.
“I chose this date as the focal period because it was still back when… Yes, I performed a sensitivity analysis, as recommended by Chau et al. A new result? I haven’t read this Teller et al., but the idea should be the same, no? Anyway, I can’t remember the exact protocol but the sensitivity analysis reveals an insignificant drift. Sorry, I performed this study five years ago. No, I couldn’t update it in time for this conference.”
4. The Work-in-Progress Fallacy
It is a truth universally acknowledged in traditional academic spaces that a conference is a venue for sharing ongoing research, which will eventually find its way into the unread pages of the world’s academic journals. It’s why professors rarely question — to inexperienced students’ chagrin — why the conference proceedings often come packaged as a password-protected ZIP folder rather than a clean, DOI-mapped PDF.
That’s if it even gets uploaded at all. For conferences with deeper pockets (shouldered, of course, by the funding agencies), it’s common to give every attendee a nicely bound paper book of contributed papers, to be made available online never. Not even dropped off at the sponsor universities’ libraries. Ask anyone who’s ever cited the Proceedings of from some conference or other if they’ve actually ever seen said proceedings. You’re more likely to come across someone who’s photographed the Loch Ness monster.
Thanks to the accepted preliminary nature of these events, it’s no wonder how much even experienced authors can get away with. Contradicting theoretical frameworks can be waved away with a promise of reconsideration. Insignificant results (or, equivalently, suspiciously too significant results) get a breezy chuckle and a reference to incomplete data. After all, the conference is not a venue to show off what you’ve accomplished, but to lay early claim to what you might accomplish, if only that one outlier finally takes mercy and reveals itself to be an instrumentation error.
“Well, the study isn’t really complete yet. This is just our work-in-progress, so naturally we have some preliminary choices. Yes, I’ve read Liao et al. Have you read Liao et al.? We will make sure to incorporate your comments in the journal submission.”
Right before proceeding to forget said suggestions (which they didn’t bother to write down) never to be remembered again until a hapless Reviewer 2 flags the exact same error during peer review.
5. The Pedantic Filibuster
What really gives the academic conference scene its teeth is the fact that, in some pathetic way, it’s a competition. A meeting of the minds, if you will. If you’re a student attending with your adviser, they likely expect you to raise questions as proof of your engagement with the field. If you’re an adjunct working in the same niche as a presenter, you want to show off not only that you read the same literature, but that you read it better, hoping some tenured professor with brand new funding burning a hole in their pocket might pick you out from the crowd. Never mind that the tenured professors aren’t actually at the organized session. They’re in the pub next door, gossiping over pints of Guinness.
Simply analyzing how the pressure can be so high in an environment where the stakes are so phenomenally low could be a paper in itself. That, and how a community of supposedly the world’s brightest minds has fallen prey to such a predatory cycle of non-tenured positions, funding proposals, and out-of-pocket travel expenses. Let’s not even mention the attendant publication and open-access fees outside of the conference track.
But it does give rise to unintentionally hilarious scenarios: professors and students bickering over whether they should have used metric A instead of metric B, why a longitudinal study wasn’t conducted for a paper that literally has the term “cross-section” in its title, or whether five long-form interviews contextualizing a regression counts as “mixed methods.” If you’ve never quite grasped the relevance of Roland Barthes’s Death of the Author, then you’ve never seen two academics weaponize the exact same paragraph of Li et al. to prove mutually exclusive points.
“You’re asking why we didn’t use regression splines for the nonlinearity? Our stated objective was to measure asymmetry in positive and negative shocks using the NARDL framework. You’re asking why that’s the nonlinearity considered by the framework? Well, it’s the one that comes packaged with the model. No, that’s not how we defined nonlinearity.”
Over time, I’ve come to question the exact utility of the academic conference. Once upon a time, it might have been highly efficient: a way to bypass agonizing journal publication timelines, present novel results, and foster actual genuine dialogue amongst well-intentioned peers. But that’s not the scene I inherited.
I joined academia during its industrial maturity, an era where professors already knew the precise definition — and dread — of their KPIs. Today, a conference gives every paper fifteen to twenty minutes (forty if you’re part of the esteemed invited speaker set) plus five for questions. In a setup where everyone is there to present rather than to listen, how much actual science is being shared? I’m not here to adjudicate. I’m just a lowly data analyst.
What I can say is this: I will keep attending, even if less frequently now that my connection to the academic world is purely vestigial. The modern conference may have metastasized into an inefficient networking mixer for grant holders, tenure seekers, and the occasional tech headhunter, but I’m not cynical enough to believe the science has died completely. Science still happens, even if sparsely. But even when it doesn’t, you can always bet your per diem that there will be entertainment.
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