Exciting!

I just submitted my first abstract to a real conference! I'm so excited! The main, biggest, most well-reputed psycholinguistics conference is being held at Stanford this year, and since Stanford is like a 90-minute train ride away and I have some results from my qualifying paper experiment now, I thought it was pretty much my duty to submit something. Worst case scenario, I get rejected, and I have a decent abstract I can submit somewhere else. So that's really exciting - I might get to present at a big psycholinguistics conference in March!

We'll see if I still think it's exciting if I get accepted and then I'm flipping out in March because I have a zillion other things to do and also have to be nervous about presenting research in front of a bunch of psycholinguistic big-wigs for the first time. But hey, we all gotta start somewhere.

I just sort of dropped in to shoot the breeze with my advisor today, and he was so great and warm and encouraging, as usual. I'm feeling excited about my burgeoning academic career these days; presenting some of my own stuff at QP Fest last week was really energizing, and now I'm thinking about getting my work out there and presenting it at like, real, big time conferences, and that's exciting too, albeit a little scary. It's such a weird process. You get this idea and are worried it might be a hare-brained scheme, so you look into it some more, and it's like, hey, this might actually make sense. So you pursue it and pursue it for weeks and months - thinking about it, writing about it, doing the research, thinking about it some more, and all the while you're finding all these little holes in your logic and potential problems with your argument, but you're too invested now, so you keep going. And then you get some results. And they're not what you expected, and you're not sure if that's because your premise was wrong to begin with, or maybe some of those many imperfections in your research procedure caused this weird result. And part of you doesn't even really care anymore and you kind of just want to stop thinking about it and make it go away, and "why did I ever think this was a good idea in the first place?" and so on. Self doubt, loss of self confidence, why-am-I-in-grad-school-and-do-I-really-want-to-be-an-academic-anyway, etc. etc. But if you're lucky, you're forced to turn all of your thought processes and doubts and slightly flawed methodology into a presentation somewhere in there, and if you're lucky, you get really excited and encouraging feedback from people whose opinions you really care about. And suddenly you're all excited again! Like, oh yeah, that's why I got all excited about this! Because it's cool! And maybe those little flaws aren't as big of a deal as I thought and I shouldn't fixate on them too much and maybe these results are pretty interesting after all.

The life of an academic, friends. It's a strange mental world we live in.