SciFoo, Google and the Fraud Police
I recently discovered my favorite description of the so-called ‘impostor syndrome’: “The Fraud Police”. Amanda Palmer is a performer, musician, composer, TED speaker… and also a writer from the USA. Disclaimer: I haven’t followed much of her art, but my favorite part of this book is how she speaks about stuff in her career that is common in many different fields. Returning to the issue in hand, she describes the insecurities and fears many of us suffer in a terribly fun and precise manner:
“The Fraud Police are the imaginary, terrifying force of ‘real’ grown-ups who you believe — at some subconscious level — are going to come knocking on your door in the middle of the night, saying:
<<We’ve been watching you, and we have evidence that you have NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE DOING. You stand accused of the crime of completely winging it, you are guilty of making shit up as you go along, you do not actually deserve your job, we are taking everything away and we are TELLING EVERYBODY. >>” ― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
Well, early this morning, the Fraud Police stormed into my bedroom, as I discovered that I was selected to give a short talk… at Googleplex.
My excitement was quickly overshadowed by one emotion: PANIC!!!!!
How did it happen that I was asked to speak at Google? I’m so glad you asked!! About two months ago, I received an email that felt very clearly like spam to me. If you have your email in any scientific journal, I bet that you’ve received many with this formula:
“We have read your interesting work about <insert whatever paper title> and we’re glad to invite you to our International Conference on <insert some area of expertise not necessarily related to the work they mentioned> in <insert whichever city in China>”.
Thankfully, I opened this particular email on my phone, where I couldn’t first delete the email until I open it. I read: “Hi Lola!”. This was surprising, because even though ‘Lola’ is my actual name, in every serious document I appear as: ‘María Dolores’ (it is a long story, I’ll tell about it in another post). This level of personalization made me think,: OK — maybe it’s kind of true that Google emailed me? To know if it was totally real, I looked it up on ‘Google’, of course (isn’t it ironic?).
Luckily, I found a few blog posts of people in my situation, so I began to believe that this was no ordinary spam email, but was in fact an invitation to the Googleplex in California. And well, everything turned to be true. That’s why I’m right now in front of my laptop trying to figure out what in the hell I can say about my work that sounds interesting to all these geniuses coming to the SciFoo event upcoming weekend.
As I understand, the format of this SciFoo is exactly what it is called: an unconference. This leaves more room to improvisation and discussion than a regular conference. That means that you can attend ‘out of the box’ discussions while trying out other areas not necessarily related to yours. Around 200 people were invited to SciFoo this year, and I am honoured to be on this list surrounded by outstanding researchers, writers, entrepreneurs, artists, economists, etc.
I’m taking the plane in two days from now. It is a long journey from Madrid (16 hours) and I am so nervous that I haven’t slept a lot during these last nights (well, I am this kind of person that can be altered by almost anything. e.g: last weekend I watched ‘Wonder Woman’ and I couldn’t slept properly because I just wanted to get out to the streets and fight against Ares to bring peace to the whole World). In this particular case, I’m nervous because I want to make sure that I bring out the best of this amazing experience.
Now it is time to work on my presentation and try to defeat The Fraud Police. Don’t worry, I’ll let you know what everything is like out there! (yes! I’m talking to you, my 2 faithful readers! — hopefully, this might increase from now on — ). Wish me success!!
