Confessions of a Conference Co-Chair

In summer of 2022, 2 advisors, myself, and a group of grad students decided to bring back the English Graduate Organization. I've been doing the most ever since, even when I wasn't even president. This experience culminated in the 2024 Red River Graduate Student Conference, which ended on Friday. Honestly, I am so glad it is all over.

As co-chair of the conference, I performed many goals including:

1. designing posters and social media content

2. fundraising at the department, college, and university levels

3. advertising through posters, social media, and many many emails

4. accepting email proposals and organizing them for anonymity

5. arranging for moderators and providing a moderator training for the grad students who had never done such before.

6. organizing abstracts for the leadership team to have an impartial voting system on who and which papers to include in each panel

7. creating, then printing copies of the conference program

8. ordering all the food

9. stuffing something like 30 swag bags

10. sending what felt like a billion reminder emails for participants to register online

11. making sure attendees could find our rooms when another event took over the main hallway, and the woman in charge of it had an aggressive attitude with me as if I hadn't paid to reserve the rooms and furniture in them. How fun!

12. taking dozens of photos for advertising purposes

13. arranging for travel for the keynote speaker

14. responding to very many emails afterwards, some less related to the conference than others.

As I'm sure the list illustrates, this was not an easy job for me, especially when I had people in my organization who did nothing. One in particular only showed up to meetings and never even accessed the program. Yes, I did have help from my co-chair and advisor, but this was still a lot of effort.

What hurts the most is how thankless this job is and how so few people in my department seemed to care about all the work we had done to make this professionalization opportunity happen. Including myself and the co-chair, only 6 students in our department presented papers at the conference. Only 3 attended the keynote speech. Only 3 showed up for the dinner with the keynote. Only 2 full-time faculty in our department attended the conference, and thank God they were kind to our keynote. Only a few non-tenure-track lecturers in the department showed up to lead workshops too. Overall, that was embarrassing for me. All my work felt so fruitless, as if nobody in my department cared about what we were trying to do.

The icing on top of the cake here included over 6 aggressive emails from a student who was angry that we had no pictures of her or shared any with her. About an hour after I finally told her goodnight, she posted several pictures of her from the event. I blocked her. I was just some puppet to make HER look good, as if she didn't get enough validation from her other pictures already.

Don't get me wrong. I love helping others. A lot of my special skills were used in my co-chair position. But at the end of the week, I was exhausted beyond belief both emotionally and physically, with monetarily soon coming my way with the catering bill. I can't help but wonder if anybody gets paid to put on graduate student conferences. I did it all for free. Even if I publish the experience and all I learned, I will still feel sucked dry like a leech.

Luckily, the keynote was kind and I am back at another national conference this week, where I can take a break from the people who treat me like nothing and learn from people who study what I study. Until further notice, I'll be running around Denver with some other rhetoric scholars. May your week be as great as I hope mine is.

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