I know it’s been a while. Basically, I want to keep this blog <50% rant. And I felt like I was about 50%, so I didn’t want to post something ranty. Unfortunately, I didn’t have anything non-ranty to post. So I didn’t post.
Today I’m writing about an epiphany I just had.
You know how something happens and, for a very long time, you have a pretty stable grasp of what was going on and why things were the way they were. Then one day, you’re asked to rehearse the story to someone who’s never heard of it before. You start off pretty bored by what seems to you to be the same thing you’ve said a million times already, until you suddenly realize — wait, THAT right there, was THIS thing I’ve been hearing about and thought I’d never experienced. Holy shit so THAT‘s what happened.
That’s the epiphany I had. Once I explain it, it’ll seem stupidly obvious, but maybe it’ll help some of you rethink your stories too.
Earlier in my grad school career I organized a conference. I did it because my advisor at the time saw a funding opportunity and thought it was a good idea. In retrospect he probably said it just as something people say, but I took it as a command and did it. He was subsequently not at all involved in the conference (because he wanted me to get the credit that it’s student-led). He also suggested a collaborator from the stats department to me. Again, in retrospect it was simply a suggestion, but I took it as a command. Mix all this with the fact that I didn’t know I was allowed to seek faculty mentorship for conference organizing (since it’s not officially in the curriculum), you get a recipe for disaster. As briefly mentioned here, the process was pretty disastrous, but the result was miraculously fine.
For a very long time, my read on the situation was this: my collaborator and I didn’t communicate because we didn’t know each other well. He had personal stuff going on and I have a persistent problem where I assume other people know what I think and think the way I do. We also had different expectations both on what a conference looked like and how an organizing process worked. He kept thinking it’s not legitimate unless he gets a big shot faculty on the team and I kept thinking we just need to find a room and stuff some people inside what’s the problem. I still think he was more at fault but we were both new to it and I handled it pretty poorly too.
That was what I’ve thought for years.
Today I was doing a career-related “describe a challenging situation and how you handled it” reflection exercise. I picked this one but I want to describe it so it doesn’t sound like I’m just saying “it was challenging because HE DIDN’T DO WHAT I SAID!” So I tried to explain why the things he did made sense to him but also posed challenges to me. I also tried to explain how I responded in a systematic way that isn’t just “so I started cc’ing everybody on this and talking to the secretary directly on that”.
This is what I discovered through my reanalysis:
My principle frustration was the fact that I kept talking to him about the conference but nothing was happening. He raised no objection to me but everything had to be checked with someone which means emails sinking to the bottom of the ocean. I now realized that this was because he didn’t think my ideas counted for anything. He kept wanting to get a faculty to approve of everything which was why, even though he had no concrete objections to my proposals, he also didn’t do anything. I don’t know why his faculty mentor (he did end up getting one, though I never met or communicated with that person about the conference and so don’t really know why he was there) didn’t give clear green lights — perhaps because he’s busy; perhaps because he thought (correctly) that the decision lies in the hands of not him but my collaborator and myself. In any case, the reason that nothing was happening was because my collaborator didn’t see me as a legitimate decision maker.
My principle response to this fact (which I realized half way through planning, though not in these words) was two-fold. One was to focus my energy on the bare necessities of the conference — scheduling a room, figuring out reimbursement for speakers, sending out advertisement. The “fluff” bit — the conference dinner, alcohol license — can wait for the slow deliberation between him and his secret mentor. If it doesn’t happen, I can still have a conference.
My second response was to divide up the responsibilities a lot more sharply. We would each be in charge of half the speaker list and we would only be in charge of our own speakers. If he wants to invite all old white men (which he did), fine. If he doesn’t send out travel info until someone emails to ask, fine. If he wants to take only fancy people (because funding limitations) to a fancy dinner, I will take the grad student speakers somewhere cozy and cheap. (The fancy dinner didn’t happen, possibly because fancy people got fancier things to do.)
Thinking about it in these terms, I recognize how typical my response was. I’ve written about how logistics is the core of organizing and also the invisible labor that doesn’t get credit before, but that was in response to Wonder, which has a much larger taskforce. I never realized that my immediate response to my collaborator was that I would take care of all the invisible logistics (well, me and a team of four super helpful secretaries) and leave him with the cool, fancy, fluffy stuff. I also intuited that clear division of labor was a good way to protect myself. The dynamic between us was not an awkward collaboration between two inexperienced students both lacking communication skills. It was a typical dynamic between a white man and a WoC.
Anyway, it’s been so long that I’m no longer bitter about any of it anymore. I’ve since met many people like that collaborator and dealt with many similar situations. It’s just fascinating to me that I had never interpreted this episode in this way until today. A mental note: it’s worth reexamine past events filed under “my failure” periodically since at some point you might realize it’s not your failure after all.
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