at what point does pretense become real?
Back in March I received an email telling me I'd been nominated by my head of department to attend a fancy "Excellence in Research" dinner up at the Castle early the next term, and that I should prepare a poster or an exhibit or something related to my research as there would be a little symposium for an hour before the dinner. I had a vague idea that I'd make a poster, but it was low enough down the priority queue that I didn't seriously start thinking about it until Wednesday last week (the dinner was last night), and realized (a) I'm really bad at poster design, (b) even if I got it finished before going out of town on Friday, there was a good chance that I wouldn't be able to get an A0 poster printed on the day on Monday. So I ended up doing a bit of a collage:
So I stood next to that for an hour last night, and it actually did exactly what I wanted it to do: It got people to come over to talk to me because they were curious about what went into the collage and they couldn't read it from a polite distance, as you often can with actual research posters. I decided I didn't want something that people could understand without talking to me, and it seems to have worked.
But what I found funny was how easy it was to slip into "salesperson" mode -- to figure out where the person was coming from and what drew him (invariably "him") to my display, and to tailor my pitch to exactly their interests. Middle-aged businessman with the air of an engineer who is looking at the formulas? Talk to them about dynamic multi-agent systems, program verification, temporal logic, etc. Retired gentleman whose eye was caught by the manuscripts? Talk palaeography and give the joke about the time I was told that I speak Latin like a medieval Englishman. No matter who came to talk to me, I could find some hook to hang the fact that what I do is incredibly interesting on.
And it was so easy. I remember when this used to be hard, it took a lot of work, a lot of pretending. And it just wasn't last night. I can do this, I can do it well, I can do it well while wearing awesome shoes.
There was a moment during my undergrad when I suddenly realized that at some point previous, I had become shy. I hadn't ever been particularly shy as a teenager, and there was no single defining turning point, but a gradual change such that all of a sudden I was on the other side suffering from a sometimes crippling inability to talk to people I didn't know, especially is huge social situations. Last night was sort of the opposite of that. I've pretended to be comfortable in these situations for so long, that it's no longer pretense. It certainly helps that I was there with a focal point, a reason for people to come and talk to me, but I fully suspect that if I had been one of the minglers rather than one of the standers, I would've done fine.
So I don't know at what point pretense becomes real, but it was at some point before last night.
So I stood next to that for an hour last night, and it actually did exactly what I wanted it to do: It got people to come over to talk to me because they were curious about what went into the collage and they couldn't read it from a polite distance, as you often can with actual research posters. I decided I didn't want something that people could understand without talking to me, and it seems to have worked.
But what I found funny was how easy it was to slip into "salesperson" mode -- to figure out where the person was coming from and what drew him (invariably "him") to my display, and to tailor my pitch to exactly their interests. Middle-aged businessman with the air of an engineer who is looking at the formulas? Talk to them about dynamic multi-agent systems, program verification, temporal logic, etc. Retired gentleman whose eye was caught by the manuscripts? Talk palaeography and give the joke about the time I was told that I speak Latin like a medieval Englishman. No matter who came to talk to me, I could find some hook to hang the fact that what I do is incredibly interesting on.
And it was so easy. I remember when this used to be hard, it took a lot of work, a lot of pretending. And it just wasn't last night. I can do this, I can do it well, I can do it well while wearing awesome shoes.
There was a moment during my undergrad when I suddenly realized that at some point previous, I had become shy. I hadn't ever been particularly shy as a teenager, and there was no single defining turning point, but a gradual change such that all of a sudden I was on the other side suffering from a sometimes crippling inability to talk to people I didn't know, especially is huge social situations. Last night was sort of the opposite of that. I've pretended to be comfortable in these situations for so long, that it's no longer pretense. It certainly helps that I was there with a focal point, a reason for people to come and talk to me, but I fully suspect that if I had been one of the minglers rather than one of the standers, I would've done fine.
So I don't know at what point pretense becomes real, but it was at some point before last night.