Jessica Birthisel | Aug. 25, 2009
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When I first entered the Boston Sheraton, the site for the 2009 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) convention, butterflies leapt through my stomach.
This was my first time attending the annual event and I was full of uncertainty. The graduate student experience at these sorts of prominent national events is somewhat nebulous. We aren’t professors, which means we often don’t have their connections or their prominence or their fancy conference garb.
But we aren’t mere students either. In fact, many of us had been asked to come and share our research, suggesting that we are already making valuable contributions to the field. And yet, upon receiving our nametags, we were branded with the conspicuous yellow “graduate student” flag. In my mind I couldn’t help but read the tag as “not a professor.”
As I settled into the conference I found myself questioning appropriateness at every turn. Was a cardigan dressy enough or was a suit jacket requisite? Was it okay to introduce yourself to a well-known scholar, even if his or her scholarly contributions elude you? Is it okay to enter into my usual chipper elevator banter with an AEJMC board member, or should I stick to conversations only about research interests? And lastly, if a high-ranking department administrator spots me in my pajamas early one morning at the hotel’s Starbucks counter, do I receive a funding cut? Okay, probably not, but the mind of a slightly insecure graduate student is a strange place.
It might seem funny to hear, but for a graduate student who spends so much time buried in articles and books, sometimes I forget that these authors are real, living people who walk and talk and fill their cars with gas. But suddenly these authors, whose work I’ve read and reread (sometimes due to obfuscation, sometimes out of interest) had suddenly leapt off of the PDFs and into the hotel lobby. And much to my relief, their interactions were not relegated to gain and loss theory, agenda setting, coding instruments or post-modernity. They laughed and joked with old friends, classmates and colleagues.
That’s when it hit me. They may be brilliant scholars with many publications under their belts, but when it comes down to it, they’re ordinary people just like me. They travel in baseball caps and read People magazine. They play cards in the lobby late into the night. They order a second glass of wine. They sneak away from the conference and enjoy sightseeing with their families. They even attend Paul McCartney concerts at Fenway Park. This shouldn’t be such a surprise. After all, the faculty members in our own department are amazing bunch of researchers, but they’re always happy to catch up with students on other important things: kids, work, sports, politics, etc.
As I leave the conference and gear up for another academic year, I will remember this convention and the insights it provided. When I prepare to send my first paper out for publication, I will not think of the editor as the stuffy old man in the dark suit, surrounded by shelves of awards, honors and self-authored books. Instead, I will visualize him as that guy in the back of the tourist trolley, the one with the Hawaiian shirt who enjoyed a sunny day in Boston with his wife and children. And if that rejection letter comes, which it very well might, I might just write back on more time and say, “Did I mention that I’m a huge McCartney fan?”
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