Introverts’ Guide to Conferences

I am an out and proud introvert. However, I was around 25 when I was finally OK with being an introvert, because majority of the world encourages people to be extroverted and treats introverted people as if they have a disease.

I don’t know how many times I have been told “talk more”, “be louder”, “be more aggressive”, “be more confident”, “don’t be timid”, … Before I made my peace with being an introvert, every time when I heard such an advice, I became either the-paranoid-android-Marvin-level sad or the-incredible-Hulk-level angry. And to make it clear, I never got angry with the people who said these to me, because I knew they cared about me and had the best intentions in mind. Instead I got angry with myself for not being louder, aggressive enough, or more verbal.

In summer 2012, I was a summer intern at Oracle labs in Bay Area. Oracle labs provided its interns with accommodation during the internship, and they assigned me with a German (half Egyptian) girl, Helena, as roommates. She immediately became one of my favorite partners in crime. Shortly after we became roommates, I mentioned her how I felt when people advise me to “talk more”. She told me “I am surprised by that. Since we started living together, we have been talking almost non-stop. I think you talk fine.” From that summer on, I started to be less and less harsh to myself about being an introvert.

Now no matter how OK you are with being an introvert, it still doesn’t work to your advantage on several occasions. One of them is conferences. As a researcher, attending conferences are an essential part of your job, and it is actually one of my favorite parts of my job. Conferences are the places where you make yourself known to your research community. To give you a clue on how important this is, while trying to schedule after-PhD-life-job interviews, I directly emailed the people who knew me from conferences rather than applying to jobs over company websites. I don’t think I would have been invited to as many interviews as I had, if these people hadn't known me from those conferences.

To be able to make yourself noticed at a conference you either should have research findings that are ground-breaking in your field or mingle with as many people as possible in the conference. Very few of us actually achieve the former, whereas many of us have to do the latter. I have nothing against mingling with people, I actually like it. However, I am inherently bad at it due to being an introvert:
(1) I am terrible at small talk (even though I became a bit less terrible at it during my PhD),
(2) I don’t like to talk too much anyway (unless I am talking about Gilmore Girls or Irvine Welsh),
(3) crowds that I have to pay attention to drain my energy (whereas crowds in the streets of a city like Istanbul energizes me), and
(4) when there are too many people around, I switch to observer mode (rather than talker mode).

Overall, I cannot claim that I did a great job in terms of mingling with people at conferences. However, I tried my best and while trying my best the thing that worked to my advantage was giving as many talks as possible in conferences. The first talk I gave at a conferences was for a paper where I was a second author. Normally, it is more traditional for the first author to give the talk for a paper. When my advisor and Greek bro (the first author) approached me to give the talk for the paper, it made me a little bit scared. But I thought “these people are a lot more senior than I am and if they didn’t think I could do this, they wouldn’t ask me”.  So I gave that talk. After seeing that talk one of the prominent members of our community invited me to give a talk at an important workshop in my sub-field, which eventually gave me an exposure and mingling chance that wouldn’t be possible otherwise at that stage of my PhD.

So the introverts, please do not turn down a chance to give a talk at a conference. Spend time to polish those talks to make sure they are good quality, especially in the early days of your careers. While giving good quality talks is a valid advice for pretty much everyone in the early days of their research careers, especially for introverts, I think it is the easiest way to mingle with people that you don’t know from before. Because after those talks, you will have a little bit less pressure on yourself while awkwardly trying to catch attention of the people you are interested in at a conference. After those talks, many people will come to you instead to ask questions about your work (so no small talk), and from there on you have their attention, do whatever you like with that attention.

And the extroverts, I just want to say the following:

Some of you I really love very much and it makes me happy to hear you talk anytime you like with your beautiful loud voices.

Some of you I envy because you make me think that how easier it would be for me in a crowd if I could just act the way you do.

And finally some of you just make me want to say “shut the fuck up, you are hurting my brain”, but I won’t, because inherently I am not very aggressive either, so I might just start gently arguing with you, or decide to minimize contact with you, or simply avoid you instead.

If you would like to gain more information about introverts vs. extroverts, you can simply google “Susan Cain”. Here is the first episode of my favorite video series on this issue, which is based on Susan Cain’s book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. She also gave a TED talk.