Best and Worst Conference Experiences

By Trevor Hedberg

Most philosophers have attended at least a few conferences. Sometimes, they are immersive and rewarding experiences where we get valuable feedback on our work, meet new people, and enjoy some good meals on the university’s funds. Other times, things do not go so well. I thought it might be worth sharing my best and worst conference experiences to provide a sense of how varied these events can be. Ironically, these took place at two iterations of the same event.

The best conference experience I ever had was the 2018 meeting of the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress (RoME). RoME is a fairly large conference that takes place in Boulder, CO in August. I attended a workshop the day before the conference hosted by the Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals and delivered a commentary on a paper about how business ethics could incorporate animals into its traditional frameworks. I later gave a commentary during the conference on a paper about the ethics of experimenting on animals, and I journeyed to the Wild Animal Sanctuary outside Denver with other interested philosophers during the Saturday afternoon that is always kept free at this event (for hikes and other outings). In between and after these events were enjoyable dinners and a lot of interesting presentations. It was a good experience in all the ways a conference attendee could reasonably hope for.

When I returned to RoME in 2023, I wanted to visit the Wild Animal Sanctuary again, so I made arrangements to rent a car. (Ride services like Uber will typically not pick you up at the sanctuary – it’s too far outside the city limits.) Although my flight into Denver was a bit delayed, things started out well enough, and Friday was a reasonably good day. My paper presentation was neither great nor terrible, but I did get some high-quality feedback on the paper. I was out late that night with some friends, and I slept through my alarm the next morning. This is where things went awry.

I was slated to chair a session that day, and though I had overslept a bit, I still had plenty of time to drive into Boulder and get to the session. (I was staying a bit outside the city to reduce hotel costs.) Unfortunately, there was a significant accident on the highway that morning that turned a 15-minute drive into a 50-minute drive, and by the time I got the car parked and made it to campus, that session was well underway. Fortunately, one of the conference organizers stepped in to serve as chair, so nothing major was disrupted. I later learned that several other conference attendees got caught in that delay on the highway, so I imagine quite a few sessions were impacted. Still, it doesn’t feel great to shirk one’s professional responsibilities – even accidentally.

That afternoon (the Saturday with free time), I went back to the Wild Animal Sanctuary with another interested philosopher. I asked the staff a lot of questions about their operations and took a lot of pictures. My hope was to use this information to design an activity about animal confinement for future environmental ethics courses. Afterward, I dropped off my comrade in animal observation near the CU-Boulder campus, parked my car nearby, and went to dinner. I had one drink with the conference-going crowd at a bar and then decided to head back to my hotel. I planned to attend most of the sessions on Sunday before going back to the airport for my return flight.

When my rental car came into view, I sensed something didn’t look right. And indeed, it wasn’t. While I was at dinner, someone had crashed into the rear driver’s side of the car at high speed, knocking it up onto the curb. (There were cars on both sides of my vehicle on the street; it had to be impressively bad driving to hit the car at the angle of impact.) The damage was quite significant. As I surveyed the wreck, a few people approached me from a nearby building. This ended up being one of the college’s fraternities. Remarkably, a CU-Boulder student had seen the impact when it happened: a white Prius crashed into the car and then drove off. He had called the police and reported the incident, and he even managed to snap photos of the car fleeing the scene, which he texted to me.

What followed was a prolonged series of phone calls between the CU Boulder Police and the accident / emergency service with the rental car company. Amazingly, the police had already found the Prius and completed a report. I submitted a ton of information to the rental car folks and arranged for the vehicle to be towed: it was too badly damaged to be safe to drive back to the airport. And somewhere in that process I discovered that my driver’s license was not in my wallet…

I deduced that I had taken my driver’s license out at the bar and not seen it afterward. It was open until 2:00 am, so I walked back there. After explaining my situation, I was allowed to search the grounds. I didn’t find my license, but I was given a number to call the next day; perhaps my license would turn up after they closed and cleaned up.

I got an Uber and went back to my hotel. The next morning, though I was still tired (having gotten to sleep after 3:00 am), my head was clearer, and I carefully searched my laptop bag and clothes for my driver’s license. I found it buried in the bottom of one of the side compartments. I still don’t know how it got there, but I suspect that I did not get it secured in my wallet successfully and that it fell out at some point when I was searching for my insurance information and digging a pen out of the bag. Perhaps I just didn’t notice in the darkness.

With one crisis averted, I spent several hours making phone calls to my insurance company, filing a claim, filling out paperwork, and uploading pictures, documents, etc., to their online system. I then took a bus to the airport and went to the rental car kiosk to make sure everything was in order before I left Colorado. I did not go to any of the Sunday sessions at the conference.

Now that’s a rough night, but that’s not why this was the worst conference experience I have had. My suffering was not yet complete. Getting reimbursed for this conference travel took months. First, there was some weird error with my travel authorization (which I had submitted and gotten approved before leaving for the conference), so I had to resubmit that material and wait for it to be processed again before I could request reimbursement. Afterward, the financial office repeatedly asked for amendments and clarification on my expenses even after I had sent a detailed narrative of the chaotic events Saturday night and every conceivable receipt one could need regarding expenses. At one point, they even asked me to describe in detail what in-class exercise I was going to use with the information learned at the Wild Animal Sanctuary (because they apparently did not want to reimburse the $50 entry fee). I did get reimbursed eventually – almost 3 months after the trip.

The interactions between my car insurance and the rental car company lasted far longer, though. I had not opted into the extra insurance coverage with the rental car company, but my comprehensive coverage was, I thought, very good. Following several months of complete silence (where I could not get any concrete information from the rental company about the situation), negotiations between the damage recovery agent and my insurance took another several months. Throughout the process, I was repeatedly looped into email exchanges, sent bills (and amended / updated bills), and reminded that I would be liable for all costs if my insurance did not pay in a timely manner. At some point, they did pay, and presumably due to the police report and the other party being liable for the accident, the whole bill got covered. I was financially unscathed by the whole thing (although I still had to make several requests to the rental company to get an official letter documenting that the claim was closed and that I owed them nothing).

Near the end of April (almost 9 months after the conference), the aftermath of that unfortunate Saturday night was finally resolved. I remain deeply grateful for the quick-witted student who called the police and got photos of the fleeing vehicle. Good sir, wherever you are, I hope you’re doing well.

So that’s my experience from RoME 2023. For those of you who attended RoME 2024 (which just concluded), I hope you had a better time. I'm not sure there are any grand lessons to learn from this experience, but if I make it back to Boulder in the future, I won’t be renting a car.

Have you had a conference experience that is just as bad (or worse) than this one? If so, what made it so bad, and how did you handle it? Or if you want to inject some cheeriness into this thread, what was your best conference experience, and what made it memorable?

(Moderator’s note: given its safe and supportive mission, the Cocoon is not a place to “out” or malign people. So, if you share bad experiences, please suitably anonymize things so that readers cannot reasonably infer people’s identities. Comments that run afoul of this won’t be approved)

Comments

[academic migrant]

When I was a grad student, I had one experience in one session that was particularly bad. I was in the audience, and I had my hand up during the Q&A whenever the chair was asking if anyone had questions. It was until near the very end when the chair asked "any other questions" when a female philosopher nearly shouted "there's one hand over there since the beginning."

I was fairly certain that it had much to do with my skin colour. I'm still very grateful towards that particular philosopher that acknowledged my existence despite the chair's action.

[Firefly]

Bad experience: I was at the Eastern APA in Washington DC when there was a hotel fire (was it 2007?). It was on our floor - I think it was the seventh floor. When the alarm went off at 4.00 a.m. we phoned down to the front desk, as the instructions say. No one answered. My partner opened the door and smoke poured in. We quickly shut the door, and contemplated what to do. I, for a moment, entertained climbing out the window (I had done some rock climbing before, repelling etc.). My partner decided we would go out through the smoke to the emergency exit. We put wet wash clothes over our mouths and dragged our hands along the wall toward the exit, walking through smoke so think you could not see. When we got in the stairwell we were surprised how calm people were - no one except those on our floor knew there REALLY was a fire. We did not tell them, as we did not want to create panic. When we got out of the hotel we saw many philosophers dressed for bed, and some even lit up cigarettes. We waited in another hotel lobby, until about 8.00 a.m. and went back to the hotel. My partner was escorted by the firemen up to the room to get our stuff, as the whole floor was being closed off. We were given a new room on a different floor. It was my partner's birthday! Boo! After the next day, when we checked out, the hotel made us pay for the room the night of the fire! NO KIDDING! It was a Marriott - once we were home, we were listening to the radio and heard the President of the Marriott say how much they cared about customer service. So I wrote a letter to him, and explained the situation. We were then reimbursed for the night.

[Rosa]

When I was very junior, I presented a paper at a feminist philosophy conference. My paper was in a session of three, with the three speakers seated at a table in front, and the current speaker giving their talk at a podium. Two of us were giving papers responding to the work of a senior feminist philosopher, who was one of the organizers of the conference and was also sitting in the audience - awesome for me as a junior person, right, to be able to give my paper and get feedback from the person I was responding to? Turns out, no. The third speaker in the session was a grad student of the senior conference organizer in the audience, and while sitting next to her listening to the other paper, I saw the following message from the senior organizer pop up on the grad student's computer: "Ugh, sorry you got stuck in a session with two such trash papers." I wonder sometimes how the senior philosopher would feel if she knew how crushed and discouraged she made a feminist philosopher just starting out in the profession...

[Michel]

I once gave a talk to an audience of the other presenters/commenters (friends, at least!) in one curtained-off corner of the dining hall during breakfast while three other talks--with mics--were going on in the other corners.

[Postdoc]

Best experience: Probably my first invited conference presentation towards the end of my PhD. Lots of really prestigious speakers, and then me. The paper was published in a proceedings volume afterwards. Absolutely invaluable at the time.

Worst experience: Had an attempt at giving a paper at a large conference slightly outside my main AoS's (but not very far from them!). It was an international flight. Three things happened:

1. On my way there, my luggage was lost. It took 3 months to recover.
2. Smallest audience I've ever had at a talk.
3. On my way back home, I got Covid, so I had to self-isolate and missed my vacation.

[Michael BB]

I've suffered unbelievably bad luck at several conferences, but the worst was the Eastern APA in Savannah, GA the year of the snow and ice storm.

Both snow and ice began before the conference could begin, so my friend and I were sitting in the hotel lobby. We then got word that people were planning ad hoc sessions on our side of the river. Glad to actually get something out of the trip, I ran up to the room to change clothes and grab a bite to eat before heading out.

The only food I had on me was a pack of Twizzlers from the drive into town. I grabbed one, took a bite, and immediately saw my front tooth (a crown, mind you, so it wasn't *that* tragic) fly across the room. I guess the Twizzler acted like a perfect little lever. Having been in this situation (losing a crown, though not at the APA) I hurried and called Walgreens. They were already closed for the storm. I then called CVS. They were roughly 1/3 a mile away and closing in 10 minutes. I hurried and put on a pair of tennis shoes, though I didn't have time to change out of my shorts, and sprinted to get dental glue.

Tennis shoes do not make for safe running in ice, so I fell a few times with one of them damaging my phone. I made it to CVS just before the closing bell and grabbed some cheap glue and made my way back to the hotel. After getting there, I changed into some professional clothes, glued in my tooth, and went to see a few talks.

I raised my hand to ask a question during the first talk. As I neared the end of the question, my tooth fell out onto the floor. I hurried and grabbed it and slipped out to the bathroom. I glued it back in again, a bit less confident but optimistic.

My tooth ended up falling out at least two, perhaps three dozen times over the course of the conference. Almost always in front of people and usually very much noticed (it's hard to ignore a front tooth on the floor, or the hideous black nub that is the shaved down remains of my previously broken tooth). Years later someone found me on twitter--where I did not have my name or any identifying information linked at the time--and set me a private message asking if I was the guy whose tooth kept falling out at the APA. That remains my most lasting conference legacy.

[G]

I was at a regional conference a few years ago when I was a graduate student. I was the commenter for a session, and only the speaker and I were there. The poor speaker was a graduate student from another program, and they took an overnight greyhound there. I felt bad for them, but we had a good conversation.

I was at an APA meeting recently. I attended an evening panel. The panel next door was having some sort of celebration - full of speeches, laughs, cheering, applauses, etc. It was so loud, and we barely heard from each other even if wee sat around in a small circle. It also lasted for almost 3 hours...

[I hear you]

Rosa
That is such appalling behavior on the part of the senior person. I almost wish you could name them (but that is contrary to the blog's mission). I have witnessed other bad behavior like this (which does not diminish your experience): a senior person at a smaller workshop searching on-line for early flights out of the place, and sending images of little garden gnomes to their colleagues during someone else's talk. I think as a community we have come to tolerate some pretty bad behavior from emiment people.

[Anon]

My worst conference experience was at a conference whose CFP said that it was a conference with two areas of focus. Once the program came out, it turned out that over 90% of the talks were in one area, which was not mine. It was an international conference, so I spent a fair bit of money to get there. My talk was scheduled in the same time slot as one of the other three talks in my area, which happened to be by one of the keynotes of the conference from a previous year. My audience only had two people in it, and there was no discussion. During the coffee breaks, I found it very hard to talk with anyone, and one of the people I was interested in talking with simply walked away from me when I said I was a graduate student. To top it off, the keynote speaker in my area only came to give his keynote. He did not participate in the rest of the conference.

I've been to several good conferences. I generally find that smaller conferences and ones more focused near my areas of specialization are better. I went to one in the past year and met a philosopher I admire a lot, and we have struck up a fruitful email exchange regarding my current work.

[Christopher Hitchcock]

I was at the same conference as "Firefly" (above). I believe it was December 2006. I too was on the floor where the fire occurred. Someone had set fire to the couch near the elevators. Remembering safety ads from my childhood I crawled down the hallway to the emergency exit to avoid the smoke (which rises to the ceiling) but got soaking wet from the carpet that had been hit with the sprinkler system. When I was finally allowed back in my room I had to pack up quickly and ended up losing my watch (nothing fancy). They moved me to a room in a different wing of the hotel and had the gall to try to charge me for the "upgrade".

My department had been conducting interviews at this convention (remember those days?) but fortunately we finished the day before the fire occurred. I can't imagine what it was like for candidates that had interviews the following day.

I'm still waiting for the perfect joke whose punchline is "1000 philosophers in their pajamas".

[Rosa]

@I hear you - I sort of wish I could name them, too, because it always makes my blood boil when I see other people in the profession talk about what a great and important feminist philosopher they are. But honestly it feels surprisingly good to just have it acknowledged how shitty it was, so thank you!

[Bill V.]

I could list any of the three Eastern APAs in the late 1990s-early 2000s when I suffered through the torture of being an interviewee, with the huge crowd at the reception, all us junior folks circling the interviewing departments' tables like socially inept sharks, desperately hoping for extra time with interview committees, bigwigs, etc. Truly awful. Not to mention the snowstorm that shut down NYC the day I was leaving, and the rat in the hotel room trash can.

But my worst conference experience was a few years later, and it was my fault. As I was landing in Pittsburgh from Wichita, I was going through the conference schedule to pick sessions when I suddenly realized that the conference was actually in Philadelphia. Fortunately there was a relatively cheap seat available on a SW flight and I was able to find a good-enough hotel near the actual conference venue, but that was some stress and extra travel I didn't need! And then the conference turned out to be a complete snore, too.

I guess my best conference experience was my first one. It was a graduate student conference in history and philosophy of science. It happened to be hosted at Harvard that year, the first plus. Then Owen Gingerich, professor of history of science there, reached out to all of us presenting history of astronomy papers. He took us to dinner, then for a tour of the Harvard Observatory, then to his office where he had a not-small library of first editions of early science books. I got to touch Tycho Brahe's signature on a note to a friend he inserted in one of his books. Still gives me chills.

[firefly]

Chris
You left out a crucial part of your story ... I saw you at breakfast, the next day. Your room was very close to the elevators, and where the fire was started. If I recall correctly, you were woken up by a guy banging on your door. He was from the room across the hall from you - he had only half woken up and went out into the hall, and was locked out of his room in his underwear (with no key, no ID, etc.). He knocked on your door ... (is my memory correct here)

[Christopher Hitchcock]

@firefly
That is basically right. I don't think he was in his underwear but all the rest is correct. I heard the alarm and assumed it was a false alarm (no smoke in my room) and was casually putting on clothes when there was a banging on my door. The person across the hall had left their room without looking at their map of emergency exits on the inside of their door, and with all the smoke they didn't know which direction was which. So they banged on my door to look at my map.

I left the room without my glasses or phone (ancient flip-top in those days). I had managed to put on pants but was still in my pajama top.

I do have fond memories of bonding with a former grad school colleague I ran into that night. We entertained each other with all of the bad jokes we could think of.

[Grad]

My worst experience was at a small international conference in my area of research. I feel like I didn't do a great job and the Q&A was kind of rough. (In general, I'm not good at Q&As in the first place - I'd rather go home and think for a few days about the question before I respond. I'm not very quick on my feet) The last question came from a postdoc that seemed very hellbent on just bringing others down. He went on this long rant that I couldn't really understand, which ended with (and I paraphrase) "and that's why your view is just wrong." After I went home I realized that he misunderstood some important aspects of my view but I didn't realize it while on the spot.

[long time ago]

My worst experience was at a very small grad conference, caused by my own resentment.

1. my talk is dismissed and criticized gravely by a few senior philosophers who come from different backgrounds/traditions. There was one famous philosopher in the audience who I thought has a similar background as mine, but he did not say anything during Q&A. It seemed to me that he was preparing his keynotes during my talk.

2. at the end, this famous philosopher gave an award to a student who comes from a different tradition. I didn't like their talk. Out of resentment, I cried long afterwards.