Speaker 1: Thanks for checking out this video. My name is Arielle. Welcome to what is about to be a recap of my attendance at the APA Annual Convention this year, 2022. It was hosted in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is a place I've never been to before. In this video, you can expect me to go over what it was like for me to attend as a graduate student, what kinds of presentations there were, what presentations I attended, what I presented on, how my presentation went, and just my overall experience with the convention. It was my first time attending, so for those of you who are wondering if you should attend APA, how to attend APA, or you've never been to an academic conference and you're wondering what it might look like, there is going to be footage of the actual conference. I took lots of video while I was there because I specifically was thinking of you and I wanted to make sure that you could see what is it like inside one of these conferences. And the APA Annual Convention is one of the biggest psychological science conferences of the year. APA, the American Psychological Association, is the organization that governs a lot of what we do in the field of psychology, at least in the US. So when we talk about applying to graduate programs, you might have seen in other videos I mentioned you need to go to an APA accredited program. APA also accredits other types of training programs, for example, internships, postdoctoral fellowship programs, so they're kind of a big deal. There's a lot of divisions in APA and they're based on area of interest, research, and clinical work. For example, there's a trauma division that I'm a part of, there is a family and couples therapy division, and you can be a part of lots of different divisions. So let's just back it up and I'm going to go over what the conference was like in general, but that's what you can expect to see in this video. So first and foremost, what was the conference like? It was huge, it was busy, it was fun, and it was what I expected it to be. So a professional conference, an academic conference, is a place where tons and tons of people from all over the place, not just the country, but some people are coming internationally, meet to talk about their work, to network, to present their findings, to recruit students to their graduate programs or to their division. So you'll see lots of types of people at a convention like this one or like an academic conference like APA. So there are faculty members, there are clinicians there, there are doctoral students, master students, undergraduate students, but there's also staff, right? So people who work in recruiting at different programs, training programs, and lots of different companies who market us. So companies who provide software for doing research, companies who provide software for doing private practice work, they're there showcasing their products as well. So the way that it looks in general is you go into this huge convention hall, which is usually where registration and lots of fun events are happening, and then you go to register. When you register, they give you this cute little tote bag and there's some fun stuff in there, kind of like promotional materials. You get a badge with your name on it, you wear that throughout the convention, and you can also get some little goodies. Sometimes there's freebies from all of the different organizations who are there to market, to advertise their programs, their business, their products. So like Alcoholics Anonymous is there, different graduate programs are there, aside from what you would normally imagine. So when you think conference, you're like, oh there's all these speakers, there's all these workshops. But in addition to that, there's lots of staff who work in higher education there, and lots of commercial exhibits, commercial booth sponsorships, and stuff like that. So that's who's there. And with that being said, I can't imagine, I don't know what the attendance was like this year, but there was, it was humongous. The convention center in Minneapolis is gigantic and there was always something happening. So the cool thing about APA and lots of other academic conferences is that they usually have an app where you can look at all the talks that are going to be happening. You can search presenters by name, you can search by division, you can search by research area. So you can kind of develop your schedule and you can save the talks that you want to attend, and then it creates like a little schedule for you and it tells you what room each thing is in. Because we're talking about a giant hotel with lots of different conference rooms, meeting rooms, presentation rooms, and you're kind of going through all day, all weekend from one talk to the next. So one con that I experienced in this conference is that the sessions were often 50 minutes, sometimes they were longer, but usually there was only 10 minutes between the next session. And of course 50 minutes goes by really quickly, so when you're attending a talk and you're really interested in the talk, sometimes the speaker's going over because they have a lot of questions or they're doing Q&A, or they're going over because the presentation before them went over and they started a few minutes late. And then after the presentation is over, after the talk or workshop is over, you want to go over to them and introduce yourself and network and maybe connect with other people who attended, but you only have 10 minutes to get to the next thing which might be on another floor or across the convention center, which like I said is very large. So I do wish that there was some more time in between the sessions and I also realize that it's probably, there's just a lot of credit that needs to be given to the people who organize these kinds of events because there's thousands upon thousands of people and so many talks and so many things happening at the same time. So in general, that's kind of the setup. You go, you register, you get your badge, you can peruse all of the different booths that are there and lots of fun free things that they have. Like I was able to get professional headshots done for free as a student and then you start attending talks, right? Before I move on to the next section of this video, I just want to stop here and remind you right now that if you haven't already, please go ahead and click the subscribe button, like this video. It is the most generous thing that you can do for me as a content creator of this platform. 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