n my second year at the City University of New York, I participated in a graduate student research conference and was transformed.

Before my talk, I was a student.

Afterward, I was a researcher.

I had redefined myself, had reconstructed my view of myself. By talking about my research in public for the first time–by simply standing apart from the audience–I had asserted myself as a person who had something to say and who would stand behind it.

At that time, CUNY had its graduate school on 42nd Street, as it still does today. Now 42nd Street is being Disneyfied, but then, in the early 1970s, it was the sleaze capital of the world. I would take the IRT to the middle of Times Square every day. I’d walk past the porno shops and the adult bookstores, the shops selling sex paraphernalia and the dark, boarded-up buildings. For a suburban girl from Philadelphia who had gone to Smith and Penn, it was shocking.

As a CUNY graduate student, I was working with social psychologist Stanley Milgram on a study of the effects of being ignored. Our methodology was simple: We staged a conversation with three people, except that two of us were confederates–graduate students working together on the study. Only the third person was a “real” person. We were told to “get to know each other,” so we two confederates chitchatted about what school we went to, what our majors were, where we came from–basic stuff–all the while ignoring the third person. Another graduate student on the research team watched us through a one-way mirror and coded the number of comments the third person made, as well as his or her non-verbals.

We learned, first, that there’s an art to ignoring someone. What exactly do you do? You have to make minimal non-verbal acknowledgment of the person’s contributions to the conversation. You have to occasionally make eye-contact. Otherwise it’s too bizarre. You seem crazy. But you do only a perfunctory acknowledgment. You look, maybe nod, then go right back to what you were saying before to the person with whom you are engaged.

If you look at it from the third person’s perspective, he or she feels totally ignored. You’re recognized as having a place, as taking up physical space, but you’re not acknowledged as existing. You feel invisible.

Afterward, when we debriefed the subjects and explained the study, they weren’t angry. They were relieved. This was the study I was presenting during my transformative moment, when I was beginning to think that maybe, someday, I could be a professor. It was the first time I had presented my work outside of a classroom setting, and when I walked up to the lectern I was nervous. But I knew my material so well that once I got started I was fine. It was a tremendous confidence booster for me when people asked questions I could answer. It made me feel like I belonged among this community of scholars when audience members gave me positive feedback about my work and encouraged me to continue it.

That I was talking about the feeling of being ignored seems ironically apt now that I’m responsible for staging the annual Graduate Exhibition. Often at large professional meetings graduate students have the sense that they’re being ignored, that they’re viewed as “only graduate students.” This identity issue–letting students re-define themselves–is key to why I think Penn State sponsors the Exhibition. We’re giving graduate students an opportunity to come out, as it were, as researchers, as artists, as professionals. We’re letting them try on a new role. And we’re trying to teach them, in a word, how to not be ignored.

Lynne Goodstein, Ph.D., is professor of administration of justice and Associate Dean of the Graduate School. The 14th Annual Graduate Exhibition will be held March 26-27, 1999. Stories in this issue were drawn from work presented at the 1998 Exhibition.