The conference center in San Francisco was bustling with researchers who had traveled to this city for the meeting. I stood backstage (if one could call it that in an academic context) and gave my presentation a final run-through. My hands were steady, my practice delivery confident. I had given this presentation twelve times in the last year alone, at various conferences. I knew this talk inside out, had worked through it, perfected it. This was different, though. This was the big one. The yearly Conference on Identity Development and Adolescent Psychology. This was the meeting where every reputable researcher in our field would be, where reputations were made and broken. It was a chance to make a real impact on my career.
And it seems I succeeded.
