What a joy it’s been! Last year, as a 1st year PhD student, I presented my first poster on my new post-traumatic growth measure at the PGR Virtual Conference 2020. I really enjoyed the talks and looked very much forward to being one of the speakers – all of them 2nd year PhD students. Today was this very day, and I held a conference speech about the development and validation process of the PRAiSE Scale. It’s great to see where we got with this project, and I can’t wait to use this novel approach in assessing growth to tackle questions that have been troubling researchers for decades. When I started my PhD, I wanted to leave a footprint in the field of post-traumatic growth, improve my statistical skills, and continue being a vocal advocate for this so tremendously important but understudied phenomenon. Giving a speech about a novel statistical approach (at least in this field) that could lead to a number of breakthroughs checks all these boxes!
We are still not there, but very much on track, and there are a number of exciting studies in the pipeline. Publishing journal articles in this field requires utmost care and diligence, and we make sure to design robust approaches and analyses before putting things out to the public. Once we have published the Scale, I’ll add the conference speech to this page – let’s not spoiler the surprise too early. đ
My key learnings:
- I can give two conference speeches on the same day (3MT Faculty finale was today)
- The more charming your attitude, the more questions you receive from your listeners
- Be upfront and transparent with your organizers – I got relocated to a different time due to my other speech, and that was no problem at all