dragonkollector
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Last Activity: 07-04-2016 12:33 AM
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08-06-2012 09:13 PMHantsukiIt was kind of obvious that he was kind of making it up as he was going along, but he also announced that this was clearly a work-in-process paper, so that also gave it away. To be perfectly honest, his paper was just beyond my comprehension, so I can’t really explain what he was talking about, but I know it had to do with the Restoration period in British literature (about 18th century) and the mundane in works of art, namely paintings. So back then, paintings were focused on drawing everyday things, such as a child blowing a bubble or a little girl brushing her doll’s hair. I think it’s supposed to evoke the feeling of innocence, and that’s what he focused on. It’s really hard to explain because he used terms that I don’t have a good grasp on either. But the title of his paper was: “Describing the Ordinary: Ethics and Particularity in Enlightenment Britain.” Sounds fancy, huh?
High school didn’t prepare me for this kind of writing at all. Even my AP Literature class during my senior year can’t compare with the kind of writing we do now. Mainly because writing in high school focuses solely on your interpretations and writing in college also involves research. You have to learn how to incorporate other people’s ideas into your own, and that’s something that can take years of training. Even I have a lot of trouble with it, and I’ve written several research papers. I’ve only had one professor who corrected for grammar errors (and in return, she didn’t grade for content) because she knows her other colleagues just leave it up to the student to catch the grammatical errors themselves. If you’re an English major, they assume you know the rules of writing.
Your question makes sense. Let me put it this way, getting published is rare for grad students and professors and extremely rare for undergrads. My professor who specializes in 19th-Century American Lit is one of the youngest professors in the English Department, and he just acquired tenure a few months ago as well as getting promoted, and he’s only published one or two articles and a book he co-authored on. Last semester when I was telling him about the grad schools I was interested in, he showed me how I should look up faculty info and we used University of Pennsylvania as an example. He looked at one faculty member and freaked out exclaiming, “This person has published ten books! Ten books!” And I replied, “Don’t feel bad, it’s an Ivy League school.” I don’t think his freaking out was entirely authentic – he did it more to entertain me if anything, but it still kind of bothered him that there are other people at “better schools” who have several books published while he’s struggling trying to get his articles published. It hurts me too because I know how diligent he is. I see him working in his office nearly every day (even during break), so that’s what you call dedication.
I went way off tangent there, but to put it simply, yes, people can adore your paper at the conference and publishers can still find a reason why you don’t deserve to get your paper published. Generally, if you’re presenting at a professional conference (which has extremely low acceptance rates along the lines of 5%-10% accepted), they will offer to publish your article in their journal specially made for the annual conference members, but not everyone does it. For one thing, just like schools, journals have different tiers of greatness. It’s one thing to get your paper published in a journal designed for grad students by grad students and another thing to get it published in a professional journal in your field, i.e. 19th-century American lit for me. Some journals are more specific than others. The more specific they are, in a way, they become more prestigious because they only want the best of the best of that specific niche in the field to be published in that journal. If you have a journal about Mark Twain, you only want the best papers on Mark Twain because you know people are reading that journal specifically for Mark Twain work. If you have a 19th-Century Journal, however, people publishing in America or Britain during that century could be reading that journal depending their interests, and therefore, they can’t always guarantee that they’ll find what they’re looking for, if that makes sense. But back to the professional conference journals. If you publish in the PAMLA journal (professional conference journal), it’s extremely prestigious because they only want the best of the best papers in that journal, and only the best of the best can present at the conference to begin with. The trade-in, however, is that the audience you tailored your paper to may not be among the readers who pick up the PAMLA journal. And the readers who subscribe to PAMLA journal may not find what they’re looking for because they can publish on any field as long as the person presented at the conference. Does that make sense? So to sum it up, it’s nice for your career to get your stuff published in the most prestigious journals, but your other goal is to get other people in your field to read your work, so you have to make the decision about whether you want prestige or a real audience.
And yes to your other question. It’s very possible that someone in the audience can change a person’s view on their own paper. That’s actually one of the reasons why we present – we want to hear other people’s opinions (otherwise, why bother? To boast, maybe?) In fact, many students who apply to grad schools end up changing their field of interest as they get deeper into their work. It’s like undergrads who change their majors in college. You go in thinking you want to study Chemistry and you realize English has always been your passion halfway through your career. In fact, one of my friends changed her major four times. She was undeclared, then through my influence, she changed to English, then to Political Science, then to History, and then back to Political Science and added History as a double major. It’s not that surprising, and you can’t help it. People change.
I’m happy to answer any random questions. Since presentations are about 15-20 minutes long, most people shoot for 10 pages. Generally, people can read a double-spaced 12 point Times New Roman font page in two minutes. I did 7 pages (plus a page for Works Cited) for my first paper and 9 pages (plus a two page Works Cited) for my second paper. And I’m sure I would have changed a few things before handing in the paper, but I think as I mentioned in my last response, I had a very busy weekend (with the conference on Saturday and the recruiting on Sunday), I just couldn’t find the time or energy to go back and give my paper a good polishing. Since I was talking about two books in my paper, I knew I had to make it sound like I wasn’t just throwing two potential papers into one, but I think it sounded like that, so I should have concentrated better on uniting them in my intro and making smooth transitions throughout the rest of my paper.
Trust me. I probably would not have been able to stay up all night and spend my morning working on the paper if it was anything other than my field of interest. I have to admit though that there were a few times where I thought I would never be done with the paper and that I should just quit and save myself the aggravation, and then I gave myself a good 60 minute or more lecture (which I should spent on working on my paper actually) telling myself that if I don’t complete this paper, I should not even consider showing up to class on Monday morning, and instead, I should spend the weekend looking for McDonald’s joints that were hiring. As you can see, I can be pretty hard on myself at times, but it got the job done, no? And yes, I’m sure your theory is correct. I was genuinely interested in my topic and I really did want to share my idea with people and enlighten them on something I thought was fascinating as well. And luckily I was wearing a rain jacket (even though it was meant more for light rain and not heavy rain) so it wasn’t bad. I just didn’t feel comfortable sitting in wet seats, but a friend I made on the bus ride offered me her bag to sit on (because my pants were probably not supposed to get wet), so that was some great luck.
Haha, that would be funny if I happened to be on the wrong bus. I’m not sure where it would take me though, but it would be funny if it took me to another conference or something!
It’s not that weird. Kids are curious, so don’t feel bad! And yes, they did kind of hurt to start out with, but luckily I tried wearing them at the day of the conference the day before, so I kind of got used to them. The second day, we did a lot more walking (so I’m convinced my feet would have hurt if I walked in normal shoes), so it did hurt a bit, but my dad was extremely kind about it when I came back. He prepared a tub and some salt water for me to soak my feet in. Sometimes he can be a real gentleman instead of just a dork all the time. -
08-06-2012 09:10 PMHantsukiI just typed this on a Word document, and it turned out to be 7 pages long, so sorry about the length! : P
I admire how dedicated you are to your volunteering work especially since you were only a high school student. Not that many high school students are that committed to their work (and even fewer are committed to free work), so I’m proud of you! I have to admit I can believe that 15 people didn’t show up because of that. Even in college, when our groups decide on meeting dates or event dates, we have several people who claim they are interested or claim they will show up, but most of them don’t either out of forgetfulness or because they’re lazy. It’s unfortunate, but it happens. I’m sorry you had a hard time doing all that heavy lifting, but look on the bright side: you probably gained some muscles in the process!
I can relate to your relation too. I’ve had teachers in the past who didn’t like students with their own opinions. They wanted to hear their own (the teacher’s) opinions regurgitated back at them for whatever reason (maybe to boast the fact that they think they know everything or whatever). I actually had a student in my Japanese class that I TAed for who told me one of her own experiences in her English class where a teacher thought she was “cheating” when they were writing their essays interpreting Shakespeare. The teacher was very much under the impression that the girl used Spark Notes or another website to copy the translation word for word, but she told her that she knows that play well because she volunteers at a local playhouse, so actors need to know the characters extremely well in order to perform well. Anyway, the scenario ended with making the girl cry, and surprisingly enough, the other students sided with the girl (why I say surprisingly is that most teens don’t like “know-it-alls” so you would think they would make fun of her for getting scolded by the teacher).
Ah, I really hope I didn’t scare you away from looking forward to uni. You also have to remember that a lot of those terms might not make sense to you because they are not entirely part of your field either. In fact, some of those terms are stuff I have a very basic understanding of as well. Besides, like I said before, both of those websites feature grad student conferences. I’m not a grad student by any means and you’re not even an undergrad student yet. You have plenty of time! But yeah, I understand what you mean. I can also relate to how you’re feeling because a lot of this stuff is beyond the classroom instruction. This is actually applying it to literature without handholding from your professors. It’s theory at its broadest point. And I admit, I’m far from understanding theory even though I’ve taken a class in it (which sounds really contradicting now that I think about it since I just mentioned that the conference themes are outside of regular classroom instruction, but if you’re confused, let me know and I’ll clarify).
I have to say, all of the presentations I witnessed were amazing. Maybe not as amazing as the presentations I saw at the professional conference last year where professors were presenting, but they were still at a level that I have not reached yet, and so I admire them. Though I have to say, there was at least one presentation that was sloppily presented, but the content was still interesting. As for one particular presentation that stood out to me, I’m sorry to say I can’t recall one that I could describe from memory mainly because a lot of the presentations were just out of my league. My paper was a pretty simple concept that I’m sure anyone could understand; the only reason it stood out in its own way was because I explored something that people often overlook (well, probably not professors in that field, but grad students who have read Frankenstein once or twice in their lifetime).
As for the other conference at UCR, I only saw my panel because I came in kind of late (maybe an hour early), and I didn’t want to interrupt a presentation by sneaking into one of the rooms. I was more focused on trying to gain enough will power to stay awake for the duration of my presentation and making sure I could speak clearly and not sound like a procrastinating undergrad who obviously had one hour of sleep. The only presenter who presented after me however had an interesting paper that I do recall because he explored something similar to what RV was presenting in his paper at the professional conference. RV was very much interested (and still is) about the purpose of space in novels especially ones that deal with racial or gender identity. So he focused on Walter Mosley’s detective fiction novels featuring Easy Rawlins, and African American detective who is capable of traveling back in forth between two different spaces: the white territory and the black territory (because white people come to him for a job and black people respect him because he is a black man with money). By the way, if you ever get the time, you should read the first book in the series: The Devil in a Blue Dress. It’s pretty awesome.
But back to the other presenter at UCR. He did something similar except he was fascinated with the way windows operate in The Marrows of Tradition by Charles Chesnutt (who is also an African American writer). From what I remember from his paper, windows are unique because they can be a solid barrier or they could be a semi-permeable barrier (because glass can always break or you can always lift up a window). I don’t remember exactly what he was trying to prove in the paper because I hadn’t read the book before, but he was focusing on a particular character that was constantly near a window. She would always examine her reflection in the window, so he was trying to make a claim about her racial/sexual identity from that. I wish I wasn’t so sleepy at the time because it sounded like a terrific paper that I could’ve really learned from.
I think you got mixed up because you read “immorality” as “immortality.” XD But no worries, I was actually worried that I typed immortality instead. And you can’t imagine how nervous I was when I was reading my paper in front of the few audience members I had while worrying that I might slip and say “immortality” without knowing and confusing everyone. : P But if you still have questions about my thesis, let me know and I’ll try to clarify. In fact, I’ll just email you my paper (since it’s probably too big for a PM) if you want to read it. Send me a PM with your email, and I’ll send it right away.
It’s a relief to know that my explanations are understandable. Sometimes I find myself thinking if I’m ever comprehensible when I explain something to someone. Most people don’t say anything, and I just take that as a, “I don’t understand wtf she said but I’m too polite to say anything.” Yeah, I don’t think they tape the sessions, but that might be for privacy reasons or something. I know it’s illegal to film someone without them knowing about it anyway. And I know I would be nervous if I knew someone was filming my performance, so it’s best that they don’t do that actually. I think a little bit of both, but mostly the first reason: my professor thinks highly of me for whatever reason, so if I screw up, it would feel humiliating and it would feel like I let him down. But also, it’s easier to present in front of people you don’t know because you don’t really care what they think as opposed to presenting in front of you people you know and want to make a good impression in front of.
I believe the chair only chairs once during the conference, but the chair can also present at another panel. It really just depends on how many people they have available to offer their services. In fact, I was at a panel where there was a student who chaired and presented at the same panel which is something I’ve never seen before. And yes, usually it’s someone who is interested in the theme of the panel or specializes in that field who chairs that panel. It only makes sense because I would feel it would be unfair for someone like me who knows very little about British lit to chair a panel about the 18th century Restoration period in Britain especially considering I would have to ask questions to a presenter who has not received questions from the audience.
And just to make it complicated, there are some conferences that have chairs and moderators. The chair is usually a student (if it’s a grad conference, it would generally be a grad student and if it’s an undergrad conference, it would be an undergrad). And the student generally has the same responsibilities as a normal chair in any other conference except he or she doesn’t have to keep time. The moderator, who is usually a professor, makes sure no one goes over their allotted time. The moderator is also responsible for asking questions if the chair is stumped and the presenters have not received questions from anyone else. The moderator performs as a sort of deus ex machina (which is a term used in plays where something abruptly arrives and solves a problem that prior to the interruption seemed unsolvable; for example, if you’ve seen Avatar the Last Airbender, Aang is conflicted about killing the Fire Nation Lord, but he has to in order to save the world. The deus ex machina is the lion turtle that arrives and teaches Aang how to defeat Lord Ozai without killing him, thus solving the problem) in that the moderator has to intervene if anything goes wrong. -
08-04-2012 12:00 AMMiniWadeJust to be sure you don't get ripped, PM the offers you get. Alright? Just watching out for you aha. -
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07-29-2012 08:57 PMDeRozanIf you can add for the Geodude, I'd be up for it. My friend has been wanting it for awhile and I want to get it for him. Please add.
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07-29-2012 01:03 AMMiniWadeThey raised to 15x a piece from offers to other people. Also if you want I can fetch you a D.Sentret U for it? I mean that's worth about 1.5x more then Charmanders full value.
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07-28-2012 08:25 PMDeRozanGoldenBagon ♀ 666
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I'm poor bro. Not happy about it, but I've been hunting down that Snorunt for awhile now. And now you have amazing stuff, no need to wish for it. -
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About Me
- About dragonkollector
- Biography
- I'm a bit of an introvert.
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- Mississauga, Canada, Ontario
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- Writing, reading, programming and playing games.
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- "Well, most of those people are going to end up flipping burgers the rest of their lives or work for some other bottom of the barrel job. Those are the people you see at fast food joints you don't want to visit again because most of them have a bad attitude and screw up your orders. Those are the people who work to live, not live to work." - Hantsuki
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