I have been to a lot of conferences over the past years, some of them being really comfy workshops for a very closed community and others being huge machineries with thousands of participants and attendees. My first international conference was a mixture of a closed community and attendees from all over the world. The name of the conference is Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing and in 2011 it was organized by the Stanford University in Palo Alto. This conference has a reputation for very strict peer-reviewing, therefore, my boss was against my applying there with the topic of my current project. He didn’t want to take chances with our common work, so I decided to apply on my own with the topic of my MA thesis. As it was not work-related, I also could not get the funding from the DFG in case I got accepted. So I also applied for a conference grant at the Academic Staff development and eventually won it.

Considering the amount of work and effort I put into this conference even prior to the actual application process, I celebrated the notification of acceptance as my personal victory. My OWN idea got me into this! I received the e-mail in the middle of the night and was so exhilarated that I had to wake up my husband and perform my victory dance in front of him. I was like: “Yey!!!!! I am going to the CUNY conference to Stanford!!!” And he was like: “Yey!!! I am going to see the Apple headquarters!.. So happy for you, my dear!”