Successful Networking at an Absolute Top Level Colloquium

After 12hours of presentations, discussions, dining, and drinks at the Getty Villa, I emerged having successfully networked with some of the very top scholars in the world in my field on the topic of Representations of the Alien. Three of the speakers were some of Oxford's best trained PhD's with a litany of books and publications - one now a Harvard professor the other at Cambridge. The best speaker has been Head of Ancient History Dept in Scotland for the last decade after separate stints at Oxford and Cambridge. Another speaker was the Vice-President of the American Institute of Archaeology and had been Head of the American Academy at Athens. All these speakers were real heavy hitters and some of the smartest people and elite scholars on the planet, leaving me feeling very much out of my depth and feeling completely inadequate as though I were a complete mental midget as one of the very few Grad Students invited. It became even more intimidating when I watched some of these eminent figures being totally dissected by Prof Erich Gruen who was the moderator of the event and had been UC Berkeley's Head of Classics and Ancient History since the late 60's. From the top of his head he could whip out the most obscure Greek and Latin sources to decimate even the slightest crack in any of the arguments or statements. He is an extremely amicable person and treated everyone well for most of the day, but then toward the end he said "I think this excellent discussion has been a bit too cordial in nature, so I will remedy that from here on out." He then proceeded to perform intellectual jujitsu on some of the best minds in the world. I did the best I could to get in on some of it as one of the few Grad students in attendance, but I was pretty far down the pecking order as all the Prof's wanted to do battle and I couldn't get much access to the microphone. Because it was on barbarian representations I was somewhat equipped to engage in some precision slice and dice intellectual forays, but the intellectual battlefield was a pretty gory mess. Everybody seemed happy with the robust debate and the day went very well. I used the drinks and dinner period to make some very good networking inroads, and I pulled this off better than any of the other Grad Students. I had a great individual discourse with Prof Gruen who was very supportive. Later, I even had to perform the Heimlich maneuver on a choking Professor of Archaeology. It's a weird feeling to do that at such an uppity reception event, but she was very grateful after having been in real trouble. Weird things happen to me, my life is just bizarre. In any case, I networked better than all others and most people seemed to think highly of me as far as I could tell. I effectively veiled the fact I was so far out of my depth and all in all it was a good day, but it took quite awhile to effectively swim in the deep end of the pool. Be well and have a good weekend while I write a paper for the next 72 hours straight - I will reemerge by Tuesday.