Psy­chol­ogy Stu­dent At­tends As­so­ci­a­tion Event in Chicago

CHICAGO – The Mid­west­ern Psy­cho­log­i­cal As­so­ci­a­tion held its an­nual con­fer­ence at the Palmer House in Chicago. As an as­pir­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal re­searcher, my in­ter­est was piqued; here is how it went:

So, eas­ily the best part about the con­fer­ence was the com­mute, and I say that with as much sar­casm as a per­son can muster, as it was a 40-minute bus ride, an hour-and-a-half train ride, and a 15-minute walk to get to the build­ing it was held in, and a 20-minute wan­der around a ho­tel – which could gen­er­ously be de­scribed as os­ten­ta­tious, mind you – to find a sin­gle room. How­ever, that is the score with travel, so I can­not com­plain too much, as it was not their fault.

The con­fer­ence, when I got there, was ac­tu­ally pretty in­ter­est­ing. The best way to de­scribe it is as a va­ri­ety of si­mul­ta­ne­ous psy­chol­ogy lec­tures. Each room in the Palmer House had pre­sen­ta­tions ei­ther every 30 min­utes or every 15. At­ten­dees could come and go as they pleased; if some­thing sounded in­ter­est­ing, go drop by, and if you were cur­rently in an­other lec­ture, just duck out in the least ob­tru­sive way pos­si­ble. Per­son­ally, I tried to wait un­til the end of a talk to leave, es­pe­cially if the speaker was an un­der­grad­u­ate stu­dent; if be­ing on your phone in class is enough to up­set a pro­fes­sor, imag­ine ac­tu­ally walk­ing out on a stu­dent pre­sen­ta­tion. 

The first stop was the reg­is­tra­tion desk, and when I fi­nally got there and pinned on my badge, I was able to pe­ruse the posters put up by the pre­sent­ing at­ten­dees. In­ter­est­ingly enough, plenty of the posters on dis­play were made by un­der­grad­u­ate stu­dents with seem­ingly min­i­mal in­volve­ment of a su­per­vi­sor, ev­i­denced by the only name with any cre­den­tials be­ing the last one in the list of au­thors. Nat­u­rally, there were grad­u­ate and doc­toral stu­dents pre­sent­ing or roam­ing around, but I was gen­uinely sur­prised by how many peo­ple were there who did not have a sin­gle de­gree un­der their belt.

The 15-minute pre­sen­ta­tions were usu­ally un­der­grad­u­ate stu­dents pre­sent­ing the find­ings of their stud­ies, ei­ther in­de­pen­dent or for a Re­search Meth­ods ad­ja­cent course. The 30-minute pre­sen­ta­tions were of­ten pro­fes­sors or re­searchers – any­bod­who had let­ters af­ter their names – giv­ing lec­tures on spe­cific re­search top­ics, gen­eral trends in lit­er­a­ture, or a brief overview of a new pub­li­ca­tion of theirs. Again, they were of­ten held in the same room, so watch­ing a ju­nior try to fol­low well-ac­com­plished pro­fes­sion­als giv­ing what felt like a TEDTalk was both slightly amus­ing and re­mark­ably pitiable. 

The day’s ac­tiv­i­ties, the day of April 21, did not be­gin un­til 8:30 a.m., CST. That is when the first sem­i­nars, work­shops and pre­sen­ta­tions took place. The one on the itin­er­ary that caught my eye was a pre­sen­ta­tion on mul­ti­lin­gual­ism. Un­for­tu­nately, for a rea­son I did not over­hear, the pre­sen­ter had to can­cel their talk at the last-minute, but there was a sim­i­lar talk tak­ing place 15 min­utes later, so I de­cided to stick around.

Af­ter that, there was a brief work­shop on ways to pre­pare for the GRE, or Grad­u­ate Record Ex­am­i­na­tion, and what kinds of ques­tions the test in­cludes. As a hope­ful grad­u­ate stu­dent, I found the pre­sen­ters to have some use­ful in­for­ma­tion, the ma­jor­ity of which can be summed up with go­ing to www.ets.org/​gre. The web­site has plenty of prac­tice prob­lems, study ma­te­ri­als, reg­is­tra­tion in­for­ma­tion, and tools to help you in­ter­pret your per­for­mance and how to im­prove. So, any grad school-minded read­ers should def­i­nitely di­rect their at­ten­tion there.

I had popped into var­i­ous lec­tures for the rest of the day, be­fore I ex­pe­ri­enced a ma­jor gripe I have with this con­fer­ence: the event sched­ul­ing. Plenty of in­ter­est­ing top­ics were talked about, all at the same time, while there were of­ten hour-long pe­ri­ods where noth­ing was hap­pen­ing un­til the next big thing. The break at noon was un­der­stand­able – peo­ple have to eat. Not me of course; I was too anx­ious to leave the build­ing, and I was­n’t pay­ing for ho­tel food. 

How­ever, at about 2 p.m., CST, there was a sig­nif­i­cant break in the ac­tion. Noth­ing was sched­uled un­til an hour later, and all of those lec­tures were two hours long, tak­ing the time up un­til an event that, for an in­tro­vert, was omi­nously la­belled as the “so­cial hour.” See­ing as noth­ing else in the pro­gram in­ter­ested me, and only so­cial­iza­tion re­mained, I hopped on the next train-to-bus-to-train to home and promptly col­lapsed on my bed. 

Sum­mar­ily, the con­fer­ence was cer­tainly an ed­u­ca­tional ex­pe­ri­ence, both on top­ics in psy­chol­ogy and what to do as a grad­u­at­ing se­nior psych stu­dent. The mora­to­rium stage af­ter col­lege is of­ten talked about, but never in a con­struc­tive sense. At­tend­ing this con­fer­ence made the af­ter-col­lege pe­riod seem a bit more man­age­able, which is why I rec­om­mend the ex­pe­ri­ence to any­one in the psy­chol­ogy pro­gram, specif­i­cally, the same event next year, tak­ing place on April 20 – 23, 2023.