You hit “submit” on your conference proposal—and then… radio silence. What actually happens next?
In this episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on what happens on the inside after you submit a proposal to present at a conference.
We’re talking about the real reasons even strong proposals get rejected, what reviewers are looking for, and how to set yourself up for success (and stay sane) in the process.
If you’ve ever been told “no” or felt like you weren’t “ready” to speak at a conference, this is your pep talk and your submission playbook.
Listen now!
Want to see how a strong conference runs – and get inspired for your own speaking future?
Register now for The Cancer Rehab Community Conference 2025 → TheOncoPT.com/conference.
Bloom’s Taxonomy Verbs resources
https://tips.uark.edu/using-blooms-taxonomy/
https://www.utica.edu/academic/Assessment/new/Blooms%20Taxonomy%20-%20Best.pdf
Want to watch the episode instead?
Watch this week’s episode of TheOncoPT Podcast on our YouTube channel!
Transcript
Elise Cantu (00:19)
Hey Onco PT and welcome back to this episode of the Onco PT podcast. In today’s episode, we’re talking about something that we haven’t talked about yet on the podcast. And frankly, we don’t talk enough about in our profession. And that is the what happens after you submit for a conference. Now, right now people are starting to get notifications from a lot of the big PT and PT related conferences that are happening around the globe.
The deadlines were earlier this year. They are now getting the news, whether they were accepted or whether they were rejected. And if the rejection term triggers you a little bit, stick with me, friend, because it is well worth it. Now we’re going to save a lot of the rejection talk for actually next week’s episode. But today we’re going to talk about what happens behind the scenes for a lot of these conferences when you actually submit, because it’s a little bit of a mystery. It feels ⁓ very
kind of in the dark and we don’t really talk about this a lot. And if we don’t talk about it, it’s really hard to understand what actually happens and then what to do to make your submission for your next conference as strong as possible. So we’re operating under the paradigm here that you have finally hit submit on a conference proposal that you’ve been working on for ages. You did all the hard work to put it together. That means, you know, picking your topic and flushing out those
⁓ those ⁓ objectives and your outline and you’ve come up with the perfect title for this conference proposal. ⁓ Now what? What happens now? So in today’s episode, we’re pulling back the curtain on what actually happens in the review process when you submit for a conference and then why sometimes even after a stellar proposal has been submitted, it’s still rejected.
and what most people never hear about submitting for conferences unless they’ve actually been on the other side. Here is the truth, the sometimes hard truth about submitting for conferences. Getting accepted to speak at a conference is not just about being the smartest or most experienced person in the room. There are actual strategies and sometimes surprises.
in what makes a submission truly stand out and be accepted. So let’s get into that today. Now, most clinicians don’t actually understand how conference presentations work. And this is not a you’re dumb. Okay, that is not at all what we’re trying to say here. But for a lot of us, at least I can speak to my own experience here, my first experience of a conference,
was when I went to APTA CSM in Anaheim way back in 2016. I know 10 years ago, almost 10 years ago at this point. And it was mind boggling truly to go to a place that had so many people there for a singular purpose, which was physical therapy profession. going to this conference. I can’t even express to you.
the overwhelm that I felt and just the the awestruck of how I was feeling in going to this huge convention center with what 15,000 other physical therapy professionals there. It’s it’s hard to put into words just how insane it truly was seeing this all for the first time. So this was my first experience. I was a first year physical therapy student. So talk about just like drinking from the fire hydrant at this point.
and then going to sit in some of these presentations. It was like, wow, this is really cool. This is really exciting. If you’ve been around the podcast for a few years, you know that this conference is actually where I found my calling as an oncology physical therapist when I stumbled into a session that Nicole Stout and Amy Litterini hosted together. So like truly life-changing experience that I had in the best way possible.
But again, very much that was my first conference experience and it was really interesting to be like, okay, this is, get this, I guess this is what professions do. Like this is what a conference is. Not really understanding or appreciating all the work that goes into making those sessions actually happen. And not just what actually goes into making them happen at the conference, but how did they get to that point, right?
They didn’t just wake up on a random morning in February and say, I’m going to present at the conference today and hope that it goes well. There’s a ton of preparation that obviously goes into curating a presentation experience that is impactful, that is educational, that is meaningful for attendees, but also that actually gets accepted in the first place. that like, if we zoom out, if we think about just how many presentations happen at CSM, for example,
I mean, what it’s three days of regular programming plus some pre-cons and whatever we’re excluding for the purposes of this conversation. And there’s how many academies and sections of APTA that have presentations on all three of these days. There’s hundreds. I mean, listen, this is me doing some quick math. Hundreds, if not, maybe like thousands of presentations happening. Insane. And if we take a step back even further of those,
hundreds of presentations.
there were probably thousands, if not maybe even tens of thousands of submissions that were sent in for that particular CSM that the programming committees or the powers that be had to go through and ultimately say, yep, this one is gonna be at the conference. No, this one is not gonna be at the conference. Like infinitely more information, wisdom, education was submitted to this conference and was ultimately rejected for one reason or another.
And this is the part we don’t really talk about, We see the end result of, want to present at this conference. I’m going to submit to present at this conference. I’ve been accepted to present at this conference. I am going to present at this conference. We see the final product after months, if not years of work to get to that point. And we don’t talk about, again, what happens in that sweet spot between when you actually submit to when you actually hear back and when you actually present at that conference.
And I think that there is a ⁓ shame that we collectively feel. And if it’s not shame, I think it’s a silence that we embody a lot of times around not getting accepted to speak at a conference, right? If I didn’t get accepted, then I’m not good. I’m not good enough. ⁓ Or any of these myths that we’re telling ourselves. And many people…
maybe you’ve experienced this yourself, many people assume that other speakers are naturally chosen to speak because they have a ton of experience or they’re just a more gregarious personality or any of these things. And that is not necessarily always the case. And I think it’s really tempting sometimes to get kind of stuck in that mentality of like, I didn’t get picked because I’m not this, I’m not in this.
Subcommittee. I’m not in this leadership position. I’m not doing this in my practice. You, my friend have really, really important information and experience that you have gained over the course of your career, no matter how long your career has been at this point, that we would benefit from hearing and knowing and listening to you present at a conference. So I tell all this, the reason that
I really came up with this episode series this this episode and the next week’s episode comes from a recent experience that I had actually last month in June around conference submissions. Now quick kind of story on this. We so there was a group of us so it was Dr. Alexandra Hill, Dr. Kelly Sturm and myself we all submitted and then presented at APTA CSM 2025 in Houston. It was our social media presentation and we had a blast doing that.
And so we said, why don’t we keep this conversation going? And so we kind of repurposed this topic, the heart of this discussion into a new presentation for the, ⁓ shoot, I’m totally gonna botch the name here, but it’s the International ⁓ Congress on Physiotherapy, specifically on oncology. It’s ICPTO, I’m so sorry that I messed that name up.
And we were really helpful. were like, man, this topic was really good. It’s really important. We believe very fervently in this information and how we’ve seen it transform oncology rehab in our spheres. We know that it can continue to have that kind of an effect on the rest of the world, right? So we did this, we did that submission, and then we also got a ⁓ slightly different little cohort. So again,
Dr. Alexandra Hill, Dr. Kelly Sturm, and then we’ve added Dr. Kelly Martin to the mix who you’ve heard here on the podcast previously for a different conference submission that we submitted to APTA CSM. Now I’m going to make you wait until next episode to hear actually like what happens, because it’s very pertinent to next week’s theme that we’re talking about. There is no way that I would have been able to submit
Even for last year’s conference. So for the 2025 conference you submit in 2024, you always submit usually like the year before for these really big conferences. There’s no way that I would have been able to navigate that application process without the guidance of Dr. Alexandra Hill. Dr. Alexandra Hill, know, whereas Onco Pelvic PT has presented at dozens of conferences at this point and has tremendous amount of experience with it. I had zero experience. ⁓
I’ve always been like going with somebody else whenever we’ve been presenting and it’s been very small. Like I’ve done a couple poster presentations at CSM. That’s actually why I got to go to CSM the very first time. And my professor was the one who put it all together. So I had no concept of what actually goes into the application process. So by the time that we wanted to submit an application to speak at CSM, ⁓ I was completely lost. And again, there’s no real guidebook.
on this, or at least that I’ve seen APTA publish, right? And I’m not saying that’s necessarily their job, but there is a lot of unknown in the application cycle and it’s kind of like Fight Club. Like we don’t talk about it. We should talk about it. We need to pull back the curtain on this application process. And then we also don’t talk about what happens kind of after you get accepted. What can I be doing for my next submission to make it as best as possible? So all this to say,
You’re not behind if you don’t fully understand what happens when you submit to speak at a conference. Like what is that process? What is required? It has been the ⁓ process over multiple years to understand what makes a good conference proposal. And I still don’t have it all figured out. ⁓ As you’ll hear in next week’s episode, I’m not accepted to speak at every conference that I ever submit for. That’s real life. So there’s not a magic code.
there is just how can we make this better over time? So let’s kind of talk about what actually happens after you submit your proposal for a conference. It’s easy to feel that once you submit your proposal that that application you worked so hard on just disappears into a void. And will hopefully emerge in some weeks or months time to say, yay, you were actually accepted.
That’s not actually necessarily the case. There is usually a very structured process behind the scenes. I’m not saying it’s a perfect process or an entirely predictable process. There is a process to go through all of the applications. Most conferences, especially at the major conferences that you might be considering, have a very formal review process. Some might have a like…
blinded situation like a double blind where they don’t know the names attached to a submission. ⁓ Some that’s not necessarily the case. I don’t know that there’s a way to know what that is unless you actually are on those selection committees. Which is kind of a bummer, but I mean in the purpose of fairness, you know, obviously they can’t give away everything I guess when you’re submitting for a conference.
But hopefully there is a degree of impartiality when these conferences are reviewing potential content. So when they’re reviewing the content that you submit, right, the application, the proposal, a lot of times they’re asking themselves these different questions. Is this topic relevant to our overall conference theme? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Maybe there is a very specific conference theme that they are going with.
That would be a good indication for you to do a little research on the front end to determine is this the case? What kind of adjustments do I need to make? Are the learning objectives in that application clear and actionable? This is not just to ensure that the teaching content is going to be good, especially if they’re submitting for CEUs for content hours. They have to be extremely clear on those objectives and they have to be.
⁓ specific and measurable. So again, we’ll talk a little bit about some like tips or strategies you can use to strengthen your proposal. This is definitely one of them, but we’ll get to more of those in just a bit. Is the session grounded in evidence? This is actually some feedback that we got multiple times with our social media ⁓ presentation, which is kind of challenging because again, the data around social media, especially in cancer rehab is still growing.
There is some really promising literature that’s been published over the last few years about the numbers and social media and the effectiveness in cancer rehab, but that’s still a growing field. And you may encounter that in your own proposals as well. And does it offer something practical for attendees to use in their practice? Now, I will say this is something that we really focus on at the cancer rehab community, because we found for a lot of times when we were going to these big conferences,
For good reason, it tends to be very grounded in the research, like the latest and greatest. However, we also know that it takes an average of 17 years from when research is published to when that actually, like those findings that practice actually makes its way into everyday clinical practice. It’s positively dismal. If you’re interested in more of that, I would encourage you look up implementation science.
⁓ Again, as someone who educates other physical therapists, this is what I really care about. And this is one of the really big focuses that Kelly and I have centered at the Cancer Rehab Community Conference. We want people to walk away from that conference and be able to take that info and put it into their own practice Monday morning right away. Now, like I mentioned, not every conference has this focus. It’s really important that you understand kind of the big
ideals of a conference, even if you don’t know all the ins and outs before you submit for this exact purpose to know ⁓ their main focus behind accepting which proposals they do and rejecting which ones they do. Now, reviewers, many times are volunteers.
And this one is a little harder for me to accept ⁓ for many reasons. I think we as a profession do too much volunteering. And I’m not saying like, don’t go out and volunteer in your community. That’s not what I’m saying. I think there is a, unfortunately, there’s a lot of exploitation of free labor within the physical therapy profession. I think healthcare in general. ⁓
because of this, and I think it limits who is able to commit to these kind of volunteer positions unless you’re in an institution, maybe like an academic or a research institution, that that is the expectation. The average clinician who has to work 40 plus hours a week in clinic or in the hospital, this can be very, very challenging. ⁓ So just know they’re volunteers and they’re human at the end of the day.
So they may be reviewing proposals like during the day, you know, maybe there’s a little bit of distraction. But what that means is I don’t want you to be disheartened. This means that minor things can add up very quickly in the proposal. If you have unclear objectives, if you have vague outlines or a proposal that isn’t really specific and doesn’t actually say what the point of all of this is, it’s not going to score very well.
And if you’re up against another really, really good proposal, it emerges very quickly of which one is the stronger proposal and which one they are more likely going to submit. So be aware, your proposal has to be rock solid to stand out among the hundreds, if not thousands, likely of different submissions, but also in the reviewers’ minds to say, holy cow, this is great.
I want to sit through this presentation at next year’s conference. Now, the last thing I want to kind of talk about in this particular section here, some amazing, incredible proposals are still going to get a no. And it’s not because they are bad, it is because of the fit. And this is something that we have absolutely encountered in submitting our stuff.
Conferences and the selection committees are oftentimes not just looking at individual proposals. They are also curating a whole suite of potential sessions at that conference and they’re likely looking for some variety. So if you have like, I don’t know, 10 different proposals that are all on treating impairments ⁓ after head and neck cancer surgery, very valid, very important topic.
⁓ But maybe we don’t need 10 of those presentations, right? Maybe they’re only looking for one. So even if you had an amazing proposal about working with patients after head and neck cancer treatment, again, yours may be rejected because someone else’s just had that secret sauce or had a little something else or just emerged as a better fit among the dozens of similar proposals out there. So the hard truth of it is,
some conferences are going to receive so many more submissions than what they have the space for. ⁓ That’s just how it is. And so they have to whittle it down to the final few that are actually going to make the cut and get invitations to speak at the conference. Even if your proposal nails it, is fantastic, it still may not get accepted. It could be that it needs a little zhuzhin up, it needs better…
more clear objectives. It needs to be more specific. Maybe it was all of those things and it just wasn’t a good fit for this year’s conference. You might be proposal number two, if they’re like ranking a list and they only had space for number one. It’s not you, it’s not personal, it’s not that you are not a good enough person, it’s not that you don’t know your stuff. There’s a lot of factors behind the scenes that frankly we just don’t know about that could be leading to that proposal.
⁓ you submitted being accepted or being rejected. Now it can be really challenging sometimes because you don’t always get feedback from the conference organizer saying why this wasn’t accepted or maybe why it was accepted. And without that info, sometimes that silence can feel like a judgment. ⁓ So again, don’t take it personally, my friend. It’s really just logistics at that point. It’s very easy for me to say that. But again, I do have some
very recent rejection stories I’m sharing on next week’s episode that I hope give you a little more like grace with yourself on this happens. Okay. So let’s talk about a few strategies on how to make your next conference submission as strong as possible. You need to do your research ahead of time. You need to look into the conference that you’re trying to submit for and figure out what is their focus? Do they have a theme? Do they have an overarching?
you know, topic that they’re sticking with. Some conferences do, some conferences don’t, but you need to know that so you can make sure that your proposal is aligned with that theme or the topic of the conference. ⁓ You need a clear emphasis on the clear, sometimes catchy title, okay? We don’t want to be overly cute or overly clever because that can get lost in translation.
I would say the most important point here is clear. It still does need to be appealing to our audience, right? I need to say, ooh, I wanna go to that. Ooh, this sounds interesting. Because a lot of times if you think about, again, APTA CSM, ⁓ if I pull up the app, I can scroll through and there’s a lot of information coming at me all at one time. The first thing I see is the title. And I will let you know if the title is a dud, it’s really hard to get me to scroll down to the description.
I would also encourage you, and this is something that I found very, very useful, don’t submit alone. Submit with somebody else or maybe a small team of presenters. There’s benefits in numbers like this. There’s multiple perspectives that can give you feedback and clarity on maybe an area that would benefit from having, again, additional eyes on. They can help build that strength of the proposal and also leverage their own unique insights and perspectives.
to overall make a more desirable conference proposal that hopefully catches the eyeballs of those conference organizers. In your proposal, you need to be abundantly clear on why this matters. We know that cancer rehab is important. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we’re talking about this. We need the specifics. Why is the attendee of this conference, again, whoever that is, the target audience, why do they need this information so bad?
badly. What is the real world problem that is the why behind your conference proposal? Be very, very clear on that because the more you can connect it back to the why, like why this conference proposal is so important, it’s going to stand out more to the reviewers. And again, this cannot just be, it’s important to me because I feel really strongly about this patient population. Note, what is the real world problem?
that your community, your patients are facing, that means this conference proposal is so important. like people need to hear this information so that they can also treat this patient population in their own community. ⁓ A couple more things here. Your learning objectives need to be clear. Number one, they need to be specific. They need to be measurable. And they also need to be active. And I know you might be thinking active.
I’m gonna take you back to your grammar days a little bit. There needs to be an action verb in your learning objectives for conferences. Again, this has to do with CEU requirements. Whenever I submit for my courses for CEUs, your objectives have to be so crystal clear on exactly what is the learner going to achieve by the end of your course or your conference session in this case.
This also shows reviewers that you’re thinking like an educator.
And not just again, someone who’s like, this is important because it’s important to me situation. No. What are the learners going to learn? Learners going to learn. Yes, that’s all that’s on purpose. What are the learners going to learn from your session? Be very clear. I would encourage you ⁓ Maslow’s. think that’s most shoot.
I totally blanked on the name of, is it Maslow or is that Maslow’s hierarchy? No, that’s not right. It’s another word. I’m just going to do a quick Google here. Verbs. Blooms. my gosh, there was an in it. I totally missed the mark on that. So sorry. So Blooms taxonomy ⁓ of measurable verbs. Look that up.
I will link to a couple of resources in the show notes. These are verbs that are literally designed for learning objectives. So I would really encourage you check those out. Use those verbs when you are creating your learning objectives. And lastly, this is something that’s going to be more on the back end of your proposal. The other tips we’ve talked about are more on the front end. If your conference submission is not accepted, ask the conference organizers why.
Not defensively, but what can you do to make your conference proposal stronger for next year or for this other conference that you want to submit for? How can you make it better? This was a strategy that honestly I never would have considered genuinely. Like it’s just my personality to just be like, okay, thanks for your time, whatever. But where I really learned this. So in my PT school, I went to Texas State
⁓ several years ago at this point and our class was broken up into about 50 % of people were coming in like right from college, right from undergrad and 50 % had a little more circuitous route to get there. Some people in my cohort had, ⁓ it was like PT as a second career. Some people had applied multiple times to PT schools and never got in. And again, this was a really good kind of.
zoom out, look at what goes into selecting a PT school program. And what we would find over the years is that they did the same thing as what we’re talking about with conference proposals. I promise this is related. So they would interview candidates. And they would, of course, you know, look at their application, you know, their GPA, their extracurricular involvement, et cetera, you know, how they interviewed, are they a human or are they a robot, et cetera. But they also looked at the class as a whole.
and they built these cohorts based on who they felt would work best together as a cohort. I don’t know how your PT school experience was. The first like year, maybe a little longer in PT school, we were in class 40 hours a week, like eight hour days, five days a week, and then we would have study more. Like we spent a ton of time with people.
and we had to be able to get along with it. And if we didn’t get along with people, we had to be able to work it out. Now, that was a really eye-opening experience. And I think this lends itself really well to the conference perspective of there are things happening behind the scenes that you may not always know what’s going on. And so that final element of making sure that the cohort as a whole work together is really, really important. And that’s a really important part of…
the conference experience. And the last little thing here, what I was alluding to previously, many of my classmates who applied to PT school and did not get accepted the first time, they then reached back out to the department after they were rejected and said, what can I do to be a stronger candidate for next time? And some of them had very specific action steps of, we really think that you should retake this course and get a higher grade. Some people got the feedback of it’s literally that we
did not feel that you were the best person for this cohort. And then they applied again and they fit perfectly within our cohort.
perfect example of what happens a lot of times at these conference selection committees, or again, the powers that be that actually select and curate the curriculum for conferences, you can ask, you can reach back out and ask kindly why your conference proposal wasn’t accepted and what you can do to improve your proposal for next time. All this to say,
No is not the final answer when it comes to submitting these kinds of proposals. I have a quote actually, it’s sitting over on my desk just over yonder by Bessie Coleman, excuse me, who was a black aviatrix in the early 1900s. And this quote says, every no takes me closer to a yes. And I love this quote for so many reasons. You should be submitting for conferences.
And dare I say you should be submitting for conferences that you think are a no. First of all, they could be a yes. But in doing so, you are getting the practice and the repetitions it takes to become proficient at something, including submitting for proposals. You see the same people present at CSM all the time. Well, they probably are really, really good at submitting for conferences by now because they’ve presented so many different times. I’m sure that certainly helps.
Getting rejected is part of the path to getting accepted eventually. Submitting is a way to get clarity on the proposal that you’re working on. What’s working? What’s not working? What can you fix to make a stronger proposal next time? And ultimately build your confidence in this process. Again, we’re working on repetitions. We are working out this muscle of submitting conference proposals. Every submission is helping you grow.
as a professional written communicator. That’s part of our job as physical therapists, obviously communication, but sometimes we don’t always leverage that written communication skill. This is a great way to do that. Work on some new skills for you. Conferences want and should want new and fresh voices. You, my friend, are not too new. There are…
literal student physical therapists who are presenting at CSM every year and other places, right? If CSM is not your jam, there’s other places that are great to present for. As students, they have insight, they have perspective that is different from others. And we know that if we’re going to grow and curate a profession that provides best quality care for our patients, we value, we need those different insights and perspectives. What a great way to do so.
your insight and your perspective, your voice is really, really important. And we have something to learn from you sharing that information. The win in conference proposals is not ultimately getting accepted. Yeah, that’s great. That’s awesome. That’s a goal that we have. It’s about willing being willing to try.
and that may sound really fluffy, I mean that sincerely. Because the only way you’re going to get out there and start doing these things that you want to be doing in your career is to start, is to try. And you’re never going to be accepted to a conference if you don’t submit for it in the first place. Now, if speaking at a conference is on your professional bucket list, let me be the first to tell you, my friend, you don’t need to wait until you feel ready.
In fact, I think now is probably a good time to start. And one of the best ways to see what speaking at a conference looks like is to actually attend a conference, to be an attendee and to watch this unfold in front of you. And so if you want a front row seat to how powerful presentations happen on oncology rehab, I want you to join us at the Cancer Rehab Community Conference 2025. We have created a space where cancer rehab clinicians can learn
connect and grow, whether you are presenting or whether you are preparing to present. Or if you just want to attend, that’s fine too. But this is a fantastic opportunity to start getting your toes dipped in the water to see how this all works. Save your seat at the Cancer Rehab Community Conference 2025 by visiting the OncopT.com slash conference. And I cannot wait to see you there.
The Cancer Rehab Community Conference is happening Friday and Saturday, November 7th and November 8th, 2025. It is just a few weeks, excuse me, a few months away. Get excited. We’ve got an amazing lineup of speakers that you are going to really love and are going to learn a lot from, not just the content they’re covering, but also how to present. So again, if this is a goal of yours, you need to be there. Until next time, this is Elise with the Onco PT. And remember,
You are exactly the physical therapist that your patients with cancer need. So let’s get to work.
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