Presented by

  • Senn Oon

    Senn Oon
    https://pensivity.xyz

    Senn is a creative dabbler, serial conference volunteer, and collector of shiny things based in Meanjin/Brisbane. In their professional life, they gravitate towards educational roles like university tutor or training assistant, but they've been known to wrangle data and think about data management as well. Some day in the future, you may find them working in a library or archive environment. For now, they're busy thinking up a subject for their Master's thesis.

Abstract

There are a bunch of great talks, workshops, and resources out there in the community about giving conference talks, and they're mostly about the operational side of things: How do I think up ideas? How do I write my talk? How do I present my talk? Sometimes they'll touch on the question of why you should present, and that's great too. There's a bit less out there about the psychological side of things aside from that - things like: Why do I feel like I'm not qualified to talk and how do I push through that? Why am I procrastinating on writing this talk and how do I not? How do I deal with the nerves when I'm up and doing the talk? These are the kinds of thoughts and questions that this talk aims to address. Join Senn as they take you through their own journey when they were preparing this very talk - their first talk at a conference* - and you'll hear about the joys, stumbling blocks, and strategies for preparing and then doing this potentially nerves-inducing but also rewarding thing. * Their Lightning Talk at Everything Open 2023 was a spur-of-the-moment singalong and definitely doesn't count.