Congress has been lovely thus far.

Events, coffee hours, and panels crammed full of academic hipsters and researchers.

And I am blinking wide eyed among it all, standing higher in my heels and adjusting the collar on the only expensive blazer I own, hoping no one will out me for being an undergraduate who does my French assignments when the Expo traffic is slow and being the new girl at the journal at that.

Luckily for them, I have been ensuring that they are not left in the dark about exactly how green I am to all of this. Considering that I executed two such events in the space of a morning (this morning) I figured it was high time I wrote about it.

Example One: Me (Striding up to the Centre of Community Based Research booth, where there has been a friendly rotation of WLU Masters students that I make friends with and swap stories with and go to lunch with…until today)

Hello! You must be a Master’s student at Laurier! I am Jessica!

Her: (Giving my extended hand a chilly stare down.) Actually. I am the C.E.O of the Company. Do I look like a student?

Me: Er, Um, *back-peddles like a champ*

Example Two: Manager from WLU Press approaches to discuss the Literary Night we both attended last night and asks me what I thought about the poets.

Me: I thought it was quite lovely, however the man who went third was rather dry.

Him: That is my boss.

Me: Oh, what I mean of course is that he is smart! Brilliant! It is only boring because people like us are not brilliant enough to understand!

Him: silent.

Me: I mean, YOU are brilliant, just not me!

But you know? These are the people I am becoming friends with. The people who come back to me and make wry comments about people watching and academia. The ones that I make grandiose social stumbles around. Maybe they find it refreshing. Maybe they just feel sorry for the new girl on the block. But it sure helps to have a group of people to laugh with, instead of at you.