Recapping My First In-Person Academic Conference

Earlier this week, I was in Nashville for FIE 2025. Now, I’m home, and I have just enough energy to write this recap!

Table of Contents

• Who Cares?
• FIE 2025
• Was It Worth It?
• My Future as an Academic

Who Cares?

It’s Thursday night, and I’m watching the Penguins piss away their second straight 3-goal lead. It’s also my first day back from my first academic conference, which I was hoping to take off to recover. Instead, I went in to make sure the labs were open for the students.

In my first day back, I discussed riveting subjects like my favorite candy with a few students before spending a good portion of one of the labs fixing up some branching issues in a few student repos. After that, I had a debate with a student about the future of AI. I then gave a lengthy explanation to another student on how to construct a syntax tree from some sample code and a grammar.

Before all of this, I spent the morning keeping my kiddo alive while studying my Japanese for the week. I’ve been hitting a real wall with concepts like “time” in Japanese, but I also finally learned about “da” vs. “desu,” which has opened a new world for me.

Needless to say, I’m pretty tired, and I don’t have some thoughtful discussion to write about. Instead, I’m catching up on an endless sea of emails, writing multiple letters of recommendation, and pondering what I could possibly write about for my weekly article.

Could I take a week off from writing? Surely, but I’ve set this personal goal for myself to keep the site going every week, even as this form of communication loses out to short-form content like TikTok and the plethora of chatbots. So, this article might not be of interest to you, but I figure it might be a good idea for me just to recap my experience at my first conference.

FIE 2025

The conference I attended this year was FIE 2025. FIE stands for Frontiers in Education, and it’s an annual education conference for engineering and computer science. In fact, the theme this year was about bridging the gap between the two disciplines, or as it was so affectionately titled, “Digital Riffs: Harmonizing Engineering and Computing Education for the Future.”

I submitted a paper titled, “Tangible Approaches to Improving Value Congruence Between Undergraduate Computer Science Students and Their Institutions.” I assume at some point it will be available in the proceedings, but it was basically a small slice of my dissertation in a more digestible form.

As a part of having a paper accepted to the conference, I was able to attend the conference to present it, which happened to be in Nashville, Tennessee. Of course, having never attended a conference in person, I wasn’t really sure what to expect, so I reached out to my mentor. She passed along some advice from a colleague of hers to spend about 1/3 of your time in presentation sessions, 1/3 of your time networking, and 1/3 of your time exploring the local city.

I’m not sure my ratios were quite that close. But since I footed a good portion of the bill myself, I figured I could take some academic liberties. Specifically, here’s a rough breakdown of how I used my time:

• Sunday, November 2nd:
  • Drive 6 hours to Nashville
  • Adjust to daylight savings and time zone change
  • Explore Broadway
  • Sleep
• Monday, November 3rd:
  • Eat a big breakfast
  • Work on letter writing
  • Go see a movie
  • Participate in the welcome reception
  • Go see a hockey game
  • Sleep
• Tuesday, November 4th:
  • Skip breakfast
  • Attend a session to support a colleague
  • Eat lunch on Broadway
  • Give my presentation
  • Attend the review reception
  • Watch election results roll in
  • Sleep
• Wednesday, November 5th:
  • Eat a big breakfast
  • Attend a session
  • Go souvenir shopping
  • Drive 6 hours home

In total, I probably spent about four and half hours in presentations and three hours in receptions. The rest of the time was spent enjoying Nashville and enjoying some time with my partner while the in-laws watched my kiddo. Of course, I sprinkled some work in there.

Was It Worth It?

Yes and no. I enjoyed being able to travel a little bit. I liked getting out of the house. I also liked being able to spend some one-on-one time with my partner.

With that said, there’s a lot I didn’t enjoy. For an education conference, there was a plethora of folks who didn’t know how to make a talk engaging. I was the only one in the three sessions I attended who asked for participation (i.e., discussion) during my talk. Everyone else gave a standard PowerPoint presentation, many of which blew past their time.

I’m also (obviously) sick of the AI obsession. So much of the conference was focused on chatbots and LLMs. It’s literally like we’re shoving this stuff in just about every corner of society at this point, and I’m not even sure how you could rigorously justify its usage in most research. It’s all hype.

I’m sure I’ve talked about this before, but I was blow away when I heard a researcher tell me that they use ChatGPT to generate Teflon patterns for their cooling research because they “didn’t want to make any assumptions.” Brother, what do you think ChatGPT does? In what world is it free of assumptions?

Tangent aside, I’m particularly bothered by how much AI shows up in education because there’s like 50 years of education research that no one is incorporating in their classrooms. Active learning? Never heard of her. Rubrics? What are those? Yet, we have to shove as much tech garbage into our classes as possible because “it’s never going away” and “it’s the future.”

I feel insane for even considering AI’s inclusion as a possible detriment to learning because we’re all racing to be the first to find some positive usage for the technology. I hope we someday look back at this the same way we do (or at least should) smoking, drinking, gambling, etc.

Beyond that, it was also just absurdly expensive. I had to pay about $850 to register. Then, the hotel was like $400 a night, so I spent over a grand just on housing. When I got there, I found my only option was to valet park the car for $67 a night. Overall, it was very expensive to attend this conference, and my department only covered about $1,500 of it for “professional development.” I get paid more to run a study abroad program.

My Future as an Academic

Y’all probably know that I’m not interested in research. Broadly speaking, if I ever got involved in research, it would be as a collaborator. I have tons of ideas for studies, but I couldn’t imagine going through the process of securing funding, recruiting labor, and working through an IRB again. I’d much rather someone else handle all that, and I get to think and write.

That said, I would love a more stable contract. At the time of writing, I’m on an annual contract and our enrollments have dropped significantly. With the state of the economy and the state of the tech industry, I could see myself losing my job in the next couple of years. It would sure be nice to secure a slightly longer contract. I’ve already been begging my department chair for a professor of practice role, but I haven’t heard much from him.

Of course, I’ve been doing a lot to cement my position at the university. For example, I run a study abroad program, and I recently got involved in a community of practice for teaching. I also write a lot of letters of recommendation, and those are the types of things I can report as service at the end of the year.

Going forward, however, if I write any more papers, they’re going to journals. I’d need a lot of a convincing to write a conference paper in the future. Journals seem to be the way to go!

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Usually, I only dabble in this space to expand on some of the ideas above, but I did want to share a review I did for another conference. I mentioned that it’s really hard to review papers that cover AI, especially generative AI, but I wanted to show you what I typically say on those papers. I don’t know if this makes me a bad reviewer, but I desperately need academics to think deeper than “new tech is here and you’re a Luddite boomer if you don’t adopt it.” Anyway, here’s the review. I tried to edit it a bit, so it doesn’t include anything identifiable from the paper:

Overall, nice work! I like how you characterized the ongoing discussion while also grounding it in the literature. I might recommend being a bit more consistent with the use of first person. For example, the conclusion sentence should probably read something like, “in conclusion, based on our review, we argue that AI holds …” The same goes for the last sentence where you might say something like, “we believe that teachers and schools …”. It seems odd to detach yourselves from the work that you’ve done up to that point.

With that said, I want to be clear that the rest of the feedback is in no way critical of your work and is more of an ask to get you to think about the role of generative AI in our society. Please don’t feel discouraged about what you wrote. I am really more interested in getting folks to think critically about the state of the tech industry and capitalism more broadly. And ultimately, I hope to convince you that perhaps older folks who are skeptical of generative AI are not, in fact, Luddites.

To start, I am not sure how controversial of a topic this is. Generative AI is being massively adopted at all levels, so any pushback is clearly not working. This paper itself is giving a fairly centrist take on the topic, which I think is how most folks are approaching it (i.e., the lukewarm take is that it might have some benefits but only if its used in the right hands).

I would urge you to consider the philosophical idea of value neutrality. Is technology value neutral? Is generative AI value neutral? To believe that it is value neutral is to believe generative AI is just a tool, but I think that strips it entirely of its social context. Ask yourself why the technology exists, who is promoting it, and who stands to gain from its adoption. As students in tech, your jobs are literally at stake because billionaires want to replace you with this tech. It’s just good enough to produce somewhat viable code while atrophying your skills or even preventing you from developing them, and therefore it’s making your labor worth less to the market. It’s also a massive concern from a security standpoint as intimate knowledge of the codebase is no longer required or even desired.

Personally, I find it troubling to [argue that completing more programming tasks is] a benefit as if that’s a compelling reason to adopt the technology in the classroom. We do not assess students on their output. We assess them on their learning. Producing code more quickly might be a benefit to corporations who seek profit, but it’s not something I particularly think we as a society should prioritize. Otherwise, we end up with more sociopaths like Musk, Bezos, and Altman.

Of course, I could go on. For example, I even have concerns around the role that generative AI will play in the loneliness epidemic. At a hackathon I recently attended, many of the mentors were recommending that students use ChatGPT to debug their programs. Having a technology with a monopoly on knowledge certainly devalues the role of relationships, doesn’t it? Why talk to a peer, teacher, or mentor if you can just ask chat?

Finally, I’ll say that it’s also a bit odd to me how papers like this are often framed with such urgency. College and university educators still refuse to adopt evidence-based practices like active-learning, yet the solution has suddenly shifted to the integration of generative AI, with almost no evidence of its efficacy. I suppose that just shows where the grant money is now.

Again, I think you’re doing the right work! Your abstract is well written, and I think it’s good to be reviewing what folks have written in this area. See the first paragraph for actionable steps you might take to polish things up. See the middle paragraphs for ways to challenge your thinking on the topic.

Obviously, by posting this, I run the risk of the original authors finding it. I realize that I probably pissed them off with this review, but I also feel compelled to be critical of a technology that is in its infancy. Also, I’m not sure of the ethical lines related to sharing this comment. I anonymized it as much as possible (i.e., direct quotes were removed, the conference name is not listed, and no additional information about the article was provided), but I’m happy to take this down if needed.