Meggie Macdonald

Of the two conferences I attended this year during my Masters degree – the “After the Fall” Graduate History Symposium at the University of Toronto, and the New Frontiers Graduate History Conference at York University – I believe, in retrospect, that I enjoyed the UofT Conference much more. However, this is only because New Frontiers fell on the last weekend of York’s Reading Week and I had several assignments that had deadlines coming up quickly.

The two conferences were almost perfectly juxtaposed to one another: structure versus flexibility. UofT’s conference organizers were incredibly astute, planning in advance for every contigency that came up. York, again partly because as a volunteer at the registration desk I saw more of the behind-the-scenes panic, seemed more haphazard.

And yet, at York I found myself listening for euphony in the presenters’ scholarly vocabulary but not actually listening to what they were saying, at least not without effort. I think the fact that both conferences were based in History departments and not in Classics made the subject matter less accessible for me. York also demonstrated a general and undirected enthusiasm for history.

UofT was clearly much more a case of a recognized need for social networking and elements of career ambitions. UofT was also much more eclectic – there were not as many participants and so the sessions had to accomodate people over subject matter. York’s conference planners seemed to have no problem with the eclectic nature of their conference and was able to avoid resistence to it, for example by having a moderator instead of a discussant.

And yet, I was much more impressed with UofT’s conference. There was a degree of professionalism there that I was expecting and was not disappointed by. It was what I was expecting a conference would be like, even though I had hoped it would be more scholarly than it was (due to the varied subject matter). Because the surprise was not in the structure of the conference but in the lack of serious scholarly discussion, I have something to look forward to when planning my next conference application.

It was a very obvious stepping stone at UofT, whereas York felt more like required participation because of my affiliation there. Perhaps that can sum up, to a very basic extent, how my Masters degree will measure up to the BA (honours) that I received from the University of Toronto.