A guide for the reluctant conventioneer


	Alan Bodnar, Ph.D. is the Co-Director of Psychology Training at Westborough State Hospital, Mass. and a consultant in the field of leadership development.

By Alan Bodnar, Ph.D.

You have to love an APA convention. Even if you are not a convention goer, there is something empowering about having the freedom to sample all of domains of human endeavor that we psychologists claim as our own. This past August, the 116th APA convention met in Boston, giving us New Englanders the perfect opportunity to take a few days away from our usual schedules and see what our colleagues throughout the country have been up to since we last got together.

In my own case, that was during the last Boston meeting of our guild in 1999. If it's beginning to sound like I am not an enthusiastic conventioneer, I was encouraged to discover that my level of motivation did not dampen the satisfaction that came from this summer's event. The overwhelming message of thousands of psychologists shuffling through the cavernous new Exhibition Center was the diversity of our profession and the opportunities this provides for building a career on foundations of curiosity and creativity. This is not to say that the message that overwhelmed me is the same as the one that impressed you and that is part of the wonder of our profession.

Consider first the convention program, a phone book-like volume of 610 pages, giving an hour-by-hour listing of presentations over a period of four days on every topic conceivably related to human behavior. It's like a smorgasbord for the mind and I suspect the way each of us goes about sampling the feast would speak volumes about our own professional development and cognitive style. You know you're a psychologist at heart when you haven't even begun to consider the content of the directory and are already making inferences about personality from the different ways users approach the materials.

Some of us may spend hours before the convention poring over the directory, listing our top selections for every hour of every day, reconciling conflicts with a handy list of alternative choices and then writing it all down on the scheduling page provided in the directory. Others may not even get the directory until they register on-site, check the offerings against their wristwatches and race into an overcrowded room just in time to join their spontaneous soul-mates on the floor in the back. In reality, most of us probably use a bit of each strategy but, then again, you never know - unless of course you turn this into an experimental study to present at next year's convention.

As for the content of the offerings, here's another projective window into the mind of the contemporary psychologist just waiting to be opened. Among hundreds of possible selections, the knowledge-hungry consumer can choose anything from a session describing the mechanism by which animals remember visual patterns, to the way people experience spiritual revelation and psychologists market their services.

So how do we fill our plates at this intellectual smorgasbord and is our style just one example of a larger pattern of behavior in free choice situations? At the luncheon buffet, do we fill our plates with small samples of the tastiest-looking offerings or go for a more satisfying portion of what we know we like best? Perhaps we have a two-stage strategy, trying a bit of this and a bit of that, and then coming back for what appealed to us most. And what governs appeal - anticipated pleasure, remembered satisfaction, a dazzling presentation or knowledge of what's good for us, the healthy choice?

As a young psychologist just starting out in the profession, I went with what was good for me and plenty of it. I couldn't get enough lectures and presentations on my then- specialty of clinical child psychology and, when my first convention ended, I regretted what I had missed as much as I appreciated what I had gained. During my second, mid-career convention, I felt the freedom to sample the feast more broadly, combining what I thought I needed to know with what I knew I wanted to know. That same attitude carried over to this summer's gathering in Boston with one important difference. If time teaches anything, it is the lesson that there is never enough of it. Nor is there ever enough knowledge, insight, wisdom, compassion and friendship to satisfy the yearnings of the human spirit.

This year, I was not surprised to have missed many presentations that I know I would have enjoyed and from which I would have profited, yet I am neither disappointed nor regretful. It was a convention filled with occasions for learning and opportunities to say hello to colleagues and students, past, present and one whom I will probably never meet again. Even so, I admire the pride, initiative and humor of the young man who saw me flipping through the convention directory and offered some help making out my schedule. He told me not to miss an especially interesting poster session where he just happened to be the presenter.

Psychology and psychologists are alive and well and there's nothing like an APA convention to make that clear. I hope to be able to go again in another 10 years.

A guide for the reluctant conventioneer (October 2008 Issue)

By Alan Bodnar, Ph.D.

A guide for the reluctant conventioneer
(October 2008 Issue)