David and Laura Go to Chicago

David Husband and Laura Minnichelli, both senior government majors at William and Mary, and I just received formal notice that our proposal to coauthor and present a paper together at a major political science conference has been accepted.  An early Christmas present for one and all!

The conference is the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association and it will occur during April 2-5, 2009, in Chicago.  The three us will attend the conference and present a paper about majority party coalition building in the U.S. Senate.  It will be one of four papers on a panel about agenda setting in that chamber of the Congress.  Other authors on our panel will include professors and scholars from places like Washington University in St. Louis, Claremont Graduate University, and the University of Minnesota.  Overall, more than 4,000 political scientists from around the world will be at the conference, presenting over 3,000 papers.

David, Laura and I are going to work on our paper during the upcoming semester and they will make the formal presentation at the conference.  Both of them will speak for five or ten minutes about aspects of the project, and then, after all four papers on our panel have been presented and the two designated “discussants” have provided their verbal critiques, David and Laura will respond to the criticisms and answer questions from the audience of two dozen or so political scientists likely to be at our session.  My formal role will be managing the clicker for their PowerPoint presentations.

If similar conferences in past years are any guide, there will be very few undergraduates at the Chicago conference.  This year, I think the organizers may set up a few sessions to showcase especially good term papers that undergraduate students from around the U.S have written for classes.  But David and Laura will be among the select few who authored papers presented during the main research panels almost entirely comprised of university professors and senior graduate students.

If you’re getting the sense that I get a major kick out of coauthoring conference papers with William and Mary students and having them make research presentations on equal footing with professional political scientists, then you’re exactly right.  We’ll practice their presentations ahead of time and David and Laura will do a superb job.  They’ll also have the opportunity to attend lots of additional panels focusing on other topics, covering just about any political subject you can imagine.  We’ll probably set up a lunch or dinner for them and a major political scientist – someone who has written books or articles that they read as part of their William and Mary classes.  The conference should expose them to the rich diversity of research currently underway about politics, and hopefully further demystify for them the process of conducting and presenting scholarship of professional quality.

And best of all, on the plane trip home, I will get to listen to David and Laura reflect on what it was like for them to spend four days in a medium-sized hotel surrounded by several thousand academics.  Based on similar excursions with William and Mary students to past conferences, I expect that they will be amazed (and perhaps a little amused) by some of the topics that we academics actually spend our time studying.  For example, one presentation at the 2009 conference is tentatively entitled, “Policy Galore: How The Films Of James Bond Tell The World What Issues Really Matter.”  Heck, I may even attend that one.