Conferences III

This week I presented at my second conference in two weeks. Last week, I stood up in the elegant surroundings of the Institute of Electrical Engineers in Savoy Place London. Here I talked about the factors that car sharers consider important in their decision to car share. Essentially, it’s all about the money. For those of you who pay an annual fee to a professional institute (Physics, any branch of engineering, computing etc) and wonder quite what they spend the money on I may have an answer. Their plush London Headquarters. All of them that I’ve been to so far have been expensively well manicured.

Anyway, I digress. Despite the time pressures of actual attending such events, the event itself is very much the tip of the iceberg. The real consumer of the hours is writing the paper and getting agreement from your co-authors on what has been written. As a doctoral student, your co-authors will automatically be your academic supervisor(s) and for an EngD your industrial supervisor. For me this means a minimum of three co-authors for any publication I produce. In practice, this number can easily be higher. For the car share paper, I had an additional author from Surrey County Council who is closely involved with the project. For the paper at the smart moving conference, there were an additional 5 people from the Transport Research Laboratory to consult, along with the Department of Transport itself. Whilst co-authorship can help to ensure that you’ve not missed out any key points of the piece of work you are trying to present it can also be a pain. Intuitively, different people prefer expressing things using different language, phraseology and terminology. Ultimately, everyone has his or her own style of writing and this can make it difficult to gain agreement the exact words that appear in the paper. Ultimately, it becomes a case of pragmatism on the part of the student. The quicker you adapt to something that more closely resembles that of your supervisor, the less red ink appears on your drafts. In fairness, academic supervisors tend to have a more scientific style of prose, which in itself is an important skill to learn as a postgraduate student.

The good thing about a decent conference paper is that it should be able to ‘evolve’ into a journal paper. Publish two or three of those during your PhD / EngD and you’ll almost need to punch your examiner in order to fail your final viva.