AAHE Scholar Talk

Well, this is going to be an interesting week for me. After nearly 18 months of knowing, I get to present my AAHE Scholar presentation this Friday at 10:15 in Tampa. I was first notified of my selection in December, 2007, received my award last spring in Fort Worth and now get to give my presentation.

Having known almost all previous scholars this past decade I always chuckled when I heard them say that they were glad to have that year to get their presentation in order. I always wondered why. Now I know. There is a combination of excitement plus fear as my presentation draws closer. The fear is that I make an utter fool of myself. I am hoping that one can reduce that risk by being well prepared.

Prepared I am. I had various goals: 1) finish the concept of the talk by December 31, 2008—which I did; 2) Have a clean power point that wouldn’t detract from my presentation by January 31—which I did (hopefully it will be clean and not distract); 3) practice the talk—I’ve done that a number of times; 4) fine tooth it the last few weeks—that I have done and will probably continue to do up until the presentation. Other than my dissertation, I don’t know if I’ve done more preparation on any project. Now, if I could only be certain that it’s good.

I have another final step…AAHE wants this in a publishable format for an issue in the American Journal of Health Education by the end of summer. One would think that this is a slam dunk, but it’s not. What is included in a scholarly paper is different than a presentation. For example, I’m not intending to ‘cite’ all of my sources in my talk. It would certainly distract from the flow and quite frankly it’s boring. However, I’ll need to do that for the paper. So, although the concepts are going to be the same for the paper, the formatting is different and that’ll take time.

I’m also going through a disappointing funk at how poorly SIU has dealt with this honor. As I write this I need to be careful that I don’t sound like a cry baby. BUT, I would think that having a scholar of the year (in any discipline) would be a big deal for the university. In fact, one would think that the university would go out of its way to promote it and to support the individual receiving such an award. There has been very little press and notoriety of this award. The fact that this is costing me out of pocket money to go and present is one thing, but one would have thought that this would have gotten a little press. Very little has been done…somehow I just don’t think it’s my job to blow my own horn…somebody else should be leading the way to promote this. When our basketball coach wins a title like ‘Conference Coach of the Year’ there is an incredible amount of coverage (plus the university usually throws in some type of financial reward). Of course, he needs it…he makes a mere $750,000 a year. It is also interesting that SIU is only the second university to 1) have back-to-back scholars (next year’s scholar is from SIU also) and 2) tied with the most overall scholars (four).

Anyway, back to my presentation. I’m planning to podcast it and upload it to my server shortly after the talk. It’ll be synchronized with my power point slides and one should be able to view it on Quicktime or Windows Media Player. For those of you who are attending AAHE I’m looking forward to seeing you again. I hope you can make it to my talk (I just want to see some friendly faces).