I'm delivering my first professional conference paper tomorrow up at Malaspina and I'm getting nervous. It isn't really in my area, and it's a paper from my MA year so it's been out of sight and mind for a while. Luckily it's a topic I'm interested in, and a prof from my dept. told me this conference is usually pretty friendly and supportive. He also warned me that if my paper is only tangientially connected to the others on the panel (which it is), I shouldn't be surprised if I don't get a lot of questions or feedback. Which is good -- it means that even if they think it's a horrible piece of trash I could walk away not knowing it and just thinking they didn't know much about it. Ignorance can be a lovely think for the academic ego sometimes.

But that's worst-case scenario. I'm sure it will be fine, it's only 20 minutes of my life, and it gives me an ever-so-important line on the CV -- which is, at the end of the day, what half of being an academic is about, if you're a cynic about these sorts of things.

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