Conference experience Joost Wolfswinkel MSc.

Based on my bachelor thesis, I was invited by my supervisor to perform additional research and improve the bachelor thesis to be able to publish it. The bachelor thesis evolved into a paper (http://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2010/52/) which was accepted at the European Conference of Information Systems (ECIS) 2010 at the University of Pretoria in South-Africa.


The research in question is about the extant academic literature in e-Recruiting field, of which we made a comprehensive literature review. To be able to perform this literature review, we came up with a systematic literature reviewing method based on Grounded Theory, which is described in detail in another paper.


After a ten hour flight I took a taxi and arrived at my initial hotel. It was perfectly fine, although I got bumped up to a better hotel by the booking agency free of charge later on. I was in Pretoria for five days and I was able to visit the entire four day conference. In this time I was able to attend a lot of worth-while presentations and I met quite a few interesting people.


The presentation of our work was not until the last day. The presentation went fine, although at the time I had been rewriting the research extensively and was not happy anymore with some of the results. The questions from the audience reflected this very well and I was pleased with the amount of helpful suggestions and critique that I received.


From start till end, it was a very good learning experience. I learned how to do academic research, how to write an academic paper and how to present and discuss your work with researchers from the same and other fields.