You know summer is on its way when the annual Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities starts wrapping up. This year, the week-long event was held at Ryerson University in Toronto and a record-setting 10,014 people attended!
The Congress schedule is always packed with events including exhibits, panels, lectures, dance parties, book launches, art installations, and more. Every minute of the day has about a dozen activities to choose from. If you attended, you’re likely exhausted and inspired. Here are our top five tips for recovering from Congress.
- Relax. We’re very familiar with pressing deadlines leaping out at you as soon as you return from a conference but take some time to enjoy the green spaces in your city, have a cup of tea on your balcony, or just take a nap. Recharging is important.
- Organize your notes. We scrawled notes on the backs of business cards, pamphlets, receipts, and various notebooks. Gathering everything into one document or notebook allows us to pinpoint what we felt was important in a lecture and easily find it again.
- Swag bag. Don’t let the bag of swag clutter up your office. Put all your free pens away, collect your author guides and publisher catalogues in a folder, and recycle everything you know you won’t need.
- Read a book. This tip might be a little biased but we know you are excited about all the books you bought at the Expo, so don’t let them gather dust on your shelf.
- Follow up. That pile of business cards in the bottom of your bag has a lot of potential but there’s nothing more awkward than following up on a lead that’s six months old. So do it now.
What are your tips for recovering from Congress or other conferences? Share them in the comments section!
If you missed out on Congre
ss this year, you can live vicariously through the #Congressh hashtag. AU Press partnered with the University of Alberta Press and the University of Calgary Press to build the library of the future. We filled our booth with our recently published titles as well as ideas for future publications such as Urban Planning on Mars and Beyond. Some titles represented a humorous take on future scholarship while others indicated a more immediate need for research in certain areas. A number of people pointed to Non/Sense: Decoding Fake News in the hopes that it was a real book. So, who will write that book?
You can find the entire collection of future books on our Facebook page.
We’d like to say thank you to the University of Alberta Press and the University of Calgary Press for sharing a booth with us again. And thank you to all our readers who stopped by to chat about their upcoming projects and our future library. And finally, thank you to Ryerson University for hosting an amazing Congress! #SeeYouInRegina!
