Last week was UTD’s spring break, a week earlier than most schools, and instead of using the seven days off to cram in lots of extra tutoring and catch up on all the reading and paper-writing I’m so behind in doing, we skipped out of town to go to a “conference” (for me) in Las Vegas!
I hadn’t been to the sparkly city since my mom took me in July 1998 to celebrate my 21st birthday. Given how quickly things change in Las Vegas (the Paris and the Venetian weren’t yet built, the Sands was about to be imploded, and Harrah’s felt *really* nice), going last week, nearly 9 years later, was like visiting an entirely new city. And, since I went with Daniel, who has (I discovered) a strong desire to play $3 blackjack tables — whereas my mom and Vicki are ardent fans of the slot machines, well, this was an entirely new experience altogether.
We ended up renting a car, which I had resisted fervently until Daniel clued me in to the fact that parking in Vegas is free — everywhere. I had just always assumed you had to pay to park, and it seemed like it would be a real nuisance to have a car, but in the end it was *definitely* the right move for us. We stayed on the Strip at the Riviera hotel, chosen simply because it was the conference hotel. Given that there was a huge NASCAR race in town last weekend and apparently that it was the first one at Vegas’s new NASCAR track/stadium/arena/whatever, the place was a mob scene and hotel rooms were outrageously expensive anyway. The conference rate negotiated at the Riviera turned out to be a steal, and by no means was it a Vegas-worthy bargain.
Given the mob scene in town, there were MAYBE five $3 blackjack tables in operation in the entirety of the Strip’s casinos AND the downtown casinos. How do I know? Because the entire time Daniel and I were in casinos, about all we did was try to find them. The few times we did, they were always completely full, and I lost track of how much time we spent milling around the full tables staring people down, hoping they would leave. I’m not fond of just milling around anyway, particularly when there are constantly people bumping up against me or milling around with me, and so I was more or less miserable; I didn’t especially want to play table games anyway, particularly not when there were so many people nearby. Daniel was frustrated (understandable) with me and with the lack of cheap blackjack tables. Poor guy.
In the end, the fact that I did actually have a conference to go to gave him the freedom to squat at a $3 table at Circus Circus one morning while I sat in on absolutely *fascinating* panels. I went to a total of six panels (roughly 2-hour sessions where somewhere between 2-4 people give short presentations on their most current research) and every single one was worth the time spent. Of course, one of them was *MY* panel, where I gave a short talk about a paper my mentor and I have been working on since last summer. The presentation went really well and I got some great feedback from the guy assigned to our panel to critique the papers (this is a standard at academic conferences).
We didn’t go see any shows while in Vegas (though I really wanted to see one called Second City, billed as a comedy show similar to “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”), which was probably a mistake, but just before we left town (after I had been sitting in conference rooms all day), we drove out to Hoover Dam to take a looksee. My mom didn’t take me out there the last time I was in town (we didn’t have a car), and Daniel and I didn’t really think to go until it was (of course!) well past dark. It lost some of its dramatic effect because it was dark, but I was nevertheless surprised by how much the reality was unlike my expectations. It’s really sorta out in the middle of nowhere and nothing like any dam I’ve ever seen. I would really like to go back during the daytime sometime and take a tour or something.
(And George, I am resisting the urge to descend into dam humor here. It’s REALLY tough!)
After I got back from the conference and rested up, it was back to reality (i.e., school) and a tough week with lots of crap due I never did actually finish. I had a paper due yesterday that I only barely completed in time, a book, also due yesterday, that I still haven’t finished reading, and a whole host of other stuff. Two important things have happened this week, though, despite the fact that I’ve felt completely unprepared for five days straight now:
First, I got my first journal rejection letter. This is for the same paper I presented in Vegas. Tom and I submitted it to the very best political science journal for publication back in early December, and the rejection letter finally came on Monday. When you send an article out for publication (or “out for review,” as we say), the journal will send an anonymous version of the paper to three other academics (“reviewers”), who write at least a page or so of critique and advice to the journal editor about whether it deserves to be published. We were both fairly sure it wouldn’t get a “Publish Now!” response from reviewers — it’s still a bit early for that — but we were hoping for a “Revise & Resubmit,” which basically means the reviewers think the manuscript has promise but want to see some fairly substantial reviews made to the paper before making a final recommendation. We got two really detailed (3+ pages) reviews that were, overall, in the vein of R&R, but the third was a two-paragraph “This sucks” review that had little or no detail (SO ANNOYING). And, thus, we were rejected.
We’re taking the same paper to another conference next month in Chicago (a very big deal of a conference with an estimated 4,000 people planning to attend — it’s just an enormous conference), so we’re trying to figure out how much to change between now and then.
Anyway, that was thing #1.
Thing #2 is that, yesterday and today, we’re having our usual mid-semester “Methods Short Course,” with a guest speaker from Canada who also teaches at several summer methods programs, including one I want to attend at some point (more on this in a sec). “Methods” in academia just means “research techniques,” and these short courses are the hard-core crash courses on fairly advanced techniques we would otherwise never be exposed to at UTD — we simply don’t have the faculty (or the money to pay faculty) to teach full courses on these topics. I missed the short course during my first semester at UTD, primarily because I was working at TWU at the time and couldn’t take two days off for it, but since then I’ve never missed one. As I’ve become more sophisticated in my political science knowledge, they’ve progressively become more understandable to me, and this semester I’m exceedingly happy to report that I am *FULLY* understanding what this guy is talking about. I actually stayed for the entire lecture/lab yesterday (roughly 6 hours of class), and I’m about to head back up to campus, sacrificing a Friday (which I do for almost nobody or nothing) to learn more. The guy teaching it is an outstanding teacher, and the technique he’s covering is an important one for my own research. It feels like Christmas, in a bizarre, I-have-to-work-for-it kind of way. 🙂
Anyway, that’s all well and good, but the guy teaching the class, as I mentioned, teaches at a summer methods program in Michigan, by far the most (in my opinion) prestigious one of the many options available. I recently found out that the institution sponsoring the summer program offers a limited number of “prizes” to outstanding women graduate students to attend, and I was seriously considering applying for one of those. The complicating factor is that I’m hoping/planning to go to a two-week summer methods program at the University of Essex (in England, yes!!!), which the UTD department will presumably pay for, and so I don’t want to jeaopardize my chance to go to Essex for free by applying for an award that will nevertheless require me to find housing in Ann Arbor for a month. So, I asked Tom (my mentor), what he thought I should do, and his advice was not to apply–that Essex and the Michigan program are roughly the same and if I can go to Essex for free, just to do that. I wasn’t convinced, though, so yesterday while I had this guy who teaches at Michigan and the department chair/head methods guy at UTD in the same room, I asked them. The UTD dept chair suggested I hold off until next summer and that, at that point, I will probably be very competitive for that award and that it would be great for me to go. I was impressed that he (a) knew my name and (b) knew enough about me to think I’d be a competitive applicant in another year. While it may not sound like much, this guy is a huge name in the political science discipline (absolutely EVERYONE knows him, most of them personally) and his endorsement is a really big deal. Tom has told me before that he knows who I am and thinks highly of me, but I’ve never seen anything supporting that assertion… until yesterday.
Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to the last two weeks. I am participating in my first-ever March Madness pool, and Duke’s lost yesterday absolutely KILLED my bracket. Geez. My southern bracket is (so far–fingers crossed!) perfect, but the others are trashed. I had picked Duke to play in the championship game against North Carolina. OH WELL. Damned Dukies.