Thanks to my Pre-Conference Planning Rituals, the week before a conference is often the most fun time making preparations as opposed to a stressful rush trying to get things together. As you can see in this colorful image here, I am at my desk and browsing the conference website. Since these websites tend to get updated regularly with changes until the meeting, I usually wait until the week before to start planning my time at the meeting. I downloaded the conference app and started familiarizing myself with its interface so that once I arrived at SRCD I could use it to seamlessly navigate the different events.

My new business cards were also delivered this week and I was BEYOND excited to see Doctoral Candidate on them! I highly recommend that no mater what stage you are in of your career that you get some made. I have had a business card since my freshman year at Spelman College when all it had was my name, Spelman email address, and Agent of Change as my "position". I believe they make a lasting impact while networking and makes me feel a different level of prepared and professional. I usually get 250 made and there are a lot of resources for free ones online, your university may offer to pay, or you can get some business card paper from Staples and print them off yourself with Microsoft Word.

This is also when I download the final Program PDF onto my iPad in Evernote. Evernote is my go to app for corralling, tagging, and organizing all of the information that comes into my life because I love how easy it is to find so many different types of information. In order to best prepare for your conference maximizing Evernote's features I suggest that you...

Create a new notebook with the title and year of the conference

Use the Forward Email to Evernote feature for any conference related email updates you get and save them all to this notebook for easy offline access

Download a PDF version of the final conference program and also save it as a new note in this notebook

Use the annotation feature to mark which talks in the program you plan to attend

Take pictures of poster presentations, fliers, and business cards of those contacts you are interested in staying in contact with

Use well titled notes to take notes at the different talks you will be attending

I hope you found this helpful and I look forward to giving you more tips during this blog series!

Restez Chic Toujours!