Nate Knows Nada

I’m here in Berkeley, for a conference related to my dissertation research. It was four younger scholars, moderated by a senior faculty member in the sociology department at Berkeley.

What was great about was that it got me a bit out of the bubble of my friends and committee at Harvard. They’ve been enormously helpful of late, but the Berkeley group of people travel outside those circles and haven’t seen what I’m up to of late, so the aspects they notice are different.

It’s also nice to have a bit of validation that what I’m doing is worthwhile and that my ideas aren’t completely cracked or crazy. People found my basic model persuasive and possibly useful.

Anyway, I walked away from it all feeling quite positive, buoyed, and ready to get a bit more work done. Six days to the prospectus conference….

Or at least a little bit tamed.

I hate Powerpoint. It’s mind-numbing. I generally think that it’s good for showing graphics and technical notes like equations. Other than that, it should just die.

But I then ran across particletree.com’s article on how to make the experience a bit more effective, and I’m only now ready to injure the program.