I had to write a short bio for an evaluation conference that I’m presenting at in September. I’m actually only speaking for five minutes, but it was on my bucket list to speak at a conference one day, so at least I’ll be able to tick that one off.
I did some research about how to write a bio and the recommendation was to make it relevant to the audience and make it short. This seemed like good advice. I’m a big fan of simplicity, so I generally like things to be short and to the point.
The audience will be other evaluators and my short presentation is about building evaluation capacity when you aren’t an expert, so I decided to just write a couple of sentences about my role and the fact that I like to work collaboratively with people.
I was pretty happy with my efforts until I read some of the other presenters’ bios. By comparison, mine was way too short and simple, so I panicked.
They were mostly written in the third person and there were a whole lot of qualifications being cited all over the joint. The other presenters sound very, very impressive!
You may find it amusing that I panicked given that the title of my talk is “Getting over the imposter syndrome”.
It reminded me of a meeting I went to when I was teaching at the local TAFE. It was the start of semester so we did a ‘go-around’ so that everyone could introduce themselves. I sat there getting more and more anxious (I hate go-arounds) whilst my colleagues cited their extensive academic qualifications and their very important titles. When it came to my turn I said “my name’s Margaret Moon and I’m a person”. I wasn’t trying to be especially funny or rude. It just seemed that this was the best way I could think of to describe myself. There seemed to be a lack of humanity and perhaps humility, in the room.
Back to my bio. In the end I did add a few details. I didn’t want to sound too pompous but I thought that people might want to know a little bit about my background and what kinds of things I find interesting. That list could be quite long if I got carried away, so I just talked about how much I enjoy solving problems and working alongside people. I didn’t talk about how much I love reading and drinking nice wine! That might be a discussion for another time.
I’m hoping that if I sound friendly enough some of the other attendees might come up and say hello. That would be nice.
Margaret Moon 