It's Conference Season!

GSA, SVP and AGU are all coming up in rapid-fire succession: it's the geology conference season! Conferences are a great place to meet your potential future collaborators (and dissenters), show off your work, and talk awesome science shop. Conferences are also a place to look for graduate programs, to shop around for jobs, and to further your careers. That makes them somewhat important... and therefore somewhat stressful. For women conferences have the complicating factors of the possibility (and for some conferences, probability) of sexual harassment, or of being disregarded for wearing the wrong clothing, or being ignored entirely by the powerful men around you. Losing your voice and confidence at a conference isn't a phenomenon known only to women, but there are certainly a lot more women-specific factors that build that possibility up.

So to help facilitate your lady scientist conference experience here is a short recap of some some awesome articles about how to kick ass and take business cards at these awesome fall conferences.

Step One: Awesome Business card

First off, why not read some of the words of extreme wisdom provided by Mary Anning's Revenge? We wrote a nice list of conference anti-harassment policies - why don't you check and see if your conference made the list and if not... get some verbal ammo to make that shit change in upcoming years. There's also our great article on how to Infiltrate the Old Boy's Club: how to get noticed and STAY noticed at this year's conference. Of course, that's always a bit of a concern for the ladies cuz we don't want attention for the wrong things. Concerned about what to wear? Commiserate with Meaghan's conference attire poetry.

But there are more resources than our mere blog can provide (well, yet anyway).Are you concerned about finding polite ways to respond to mansplaining? Sometimes the middle finger just doesn't work, but there are other phrases to memorize and employ when you are interrupted, derailed, repeated, or otherwise talked over by a male colleague. Or maybe you're having a little bit of imposter syndrome about presenting your research? Let Amy Cuddy help you posture your body to feel more confident (which sounds like a Dr. Oz recommendation but this is actually based in SCIENCE.) And if raising your arms over your head doesn't make you feel confident enough, try some other little steps to combat imposter syndrome, including making lists of your greatness. Hell just being aware of the problem can help you solve it, so learn a little more about the confidence gap - and then defy it when presenting.

We used this GIF quite recently but even though Meaghan absolutely hates this show, it's a REALLY GOOD GIF so we'll use it one more time, cuz it's an important thing to remember:

Now go out there and kick conference ass.

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