Screwed! And not the enjoyable kind...

On occasion I receive emails from The National Communication Association (NCA) regarding conferences and papers and publications etc that I used to be involved in when I was in grad school. Usually I delete the emails and don't look too closely at them, but today one caught my eye. It was for the annual NCA convention that is coming up and the topics that will be presented. One presentation that I found to be particularly interesting was Increasing Participation through Identification: A case study of the American Red Cross of Central Texas. Why does that sound interesting you may be asking, because I was in the group that conducted the research and wrote that paper. As I scrolled down to see who the authors were indeed everyone in my group was listed, except me. I may not be in school anymore but I conducted and transcribed 25 interviews with Red Cross volunteers and wrote a good portion of the lit review and did just as much work as everyone else. When we presented our findings to our professor I remember she was impressed and very pleased with our work and suggested that we get it published and/or present it at NCA. I am sure they did some revisions, I read the abstract though and it discussed the same results that we found so fundamentally nothing changed. I suppose they didn't think I would come across it anyway so it was a non issue but I sacrificed sleep and mental health getting that paper done, I think I deserve a little credit! Eh, oh well, it is not like it is going to help me out in my current career.

UPDATE: I received an email a few moments ago from one of my group members (without any prompting either which was weird) saying that the actual paper has all authors on it, including me (I was the only one left off the NCA panel listing for whatever reason). I was also informed that the paper has been submitted to be published in the Journal of Applied Communication Research. I could be a published author in an obscure academic journal that no one has ever heard of! It was actually an interesting paper because we were able to interview people who volunteered at Red Cross shelters after Hurricane Katrina. Their stories and experiences were incredible and we were able to offer some concrete suggestions to the Red Cross on how they could improve communication and improve their volunteer coordination in the event of a crisis like a major Hurricane. No word on if they took any of the advice, but I really liked that this project was centered less in the academic realm and more in the practical realm where I always feel research should be.