Good News! (Mostly)

I'm supposed to be packing right now because Penn and I have to head to the airport to catch our flight to Chicago in a few hours. But! I just checked my e-mail and I found out one of my papers got accepted to a conference! This is the second conference I've been accepted to this summer.
One of them, the one I got accepted to last month (but for some reason never wrote about here), is one of the most prestigious conferences in my field. There are two major conferences that you really need to get on your resume at some point to be competitive in the job market, and this is one of them. I thought it would take me YEARS to actually have a paper accepted at this conference because I've heard horror stories of some of my colleagues putting together panels with major scholars and still not getting accepted. My original plan was to sit this year out: go to the conference (since I've never been) and see how it works but not actually submit a paper. But Dr. AMP talked me into submitting an abstract. I waited until the very last minute, then churned something out based on a paper I wrote last semester and sent it in a few hours before the deadline, mostly just because I thought Dr. AMP would be disappointed in me if I didn't at least try. I was absolutely shocked when my paper got accepted to a panel. Nicole got accepted to the same panel, which is really exciting. My theory is that I only got accepted because Dr. AMP is one of the panel chairs this year, but hey, take advantage when you can, right? Plus there are five other panel chairs, so it can't entirely be favoritism, can it? At any rate, my paper got accepted and I am very excited about that mostly just because it's a weight off my shoulders, one of those must-do-if-you-want-a-j0b-eventually things that I will now be able to cross of the list. I'm also terrified, though, because there are some very important people on this panel and I am horrified of the idea of them reading and discussing my piddly little paper. It's all style and no substance at this point. I'm going to need to work on that. Soon.
Especially since I now have ANOTHER conference to go to in the fall! The one I found out about today is a conference that is not in my field. It's only minorly related to what I actually study, but I dabbled in it a bit in a class I took in the fall, which is where the paper I submitted came from. I put together a panel with some friends from my university and some people from another university since the conference is all about interdisciplinary collaboration. I figured our panel had a very good chance of getting in since we are not only from another discipline, we are collaborating between two universities. Plus one of the faculty co-sponsors for our panel is a pretty big name, so I figured that would give us an advantage, too. But even though I figured we'd get in, I sort of forgot about the whole thing altogether since we submitted the proposal months ago. Getting the e-mail today was a nice surprise. Conferences always bring up such contradictory emotions, though: excitement to get in, fear about actually having to write and give a paper.

The problem with getting accepted to both of these conferences is that they are both in November, one right after the other, and on complete opposite sides of the country. November is a difficult time of year anyway, what with the end-of-semester rush, and now I'm going to have to be in Boston for several days and then immediately after that I'll have to fly out to San Francisco. I'm not complaining, exactly. I'm honored that people like the idea of my research enough to invite me to speak at conferences, and both Boston and San Francisco are cool cities that will be fun to hang out in for a few days. But it's going to cost a lot of money to do the traveling, and it is going to be very stressful to get two conference papers written in the midst of all of my other school work for the fall. Still, overall this is good news and I'm very excited.

Alright, back to packing!