On May 20 – 22 I was invited to the 6th Annual Islamic Graduate Student Conference hosted at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This was my first experience of having a paper accepted to an academic conference and being able to present. I wanted to remember the event and also be able to share with my colleagues and friends, so I filmed my experience and made a short web series. For graduate students, especially at GSU,  I wanted to be able to show them what they can look forward to and expect.

 

I enjoyed the UCSB campus, it sits right on a beach. The students travel mainly by bicycle and skateboard. As you will see from the videos, it was an overwhelming amount of bikes. I was very nervous once I walked in the conference and saw the other students. I saw people talking and didn’t know who knew each other. After our first break I was able to meet a few students and we had good conversations about our backgrounds and the type of work we were interested in producing. My presentation was the last of the conference so I was able to see each before I went. All in all it was a wonderful conference and I learned from the other presenters. I would definitely suggest graduate students to submit to calls for papers at conferences. Speaking in front of academics can be scary, but it is definitely something that will happen in the future if we are the next scholars. I hope you enjoy the videos.