Attending Conferences
Getting the most out of the academic conference experience.
Sooner or later in your academic career you will attend an academic conference. However, attending your very first conference can be confusing, bewildering, and overwhelming. This is particularly true for those students who spent the first part of their career locked away at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here I will try to give you an overview of how conferences work and how you can get the most out of them.
Some of the advice in this post is very basic or even obvious. For example, for most people, the discussion about professional behavior is hopefully unnecessary. This guide is intended to cover all aspects of conference attendance for new graduate students — please don’t take offense.
Preparing for the Conference
Spend some time preparing for the academic side of the conference. In most cases, conferences will make an advance program available on the conference website prior to the event. This is an opportunity for the attentive conference-goer to read up in advance on the things that will be presented at the conference. For some conferences (like ACM CHI), there are multiple parallel tracks, so you will have to make a conscious decision on which talks to attend. The advance program will help you make these decisions.
If you are presenting anything at the conference, you should start preparing well in advance for this. Remember that making slideshows, designing a poster, printing a poster, rehearsing a talk, and getting your notes in order can be time-consuming, so do not save it until the last instant.
Building your Presentation
If you are attending the conference in order to present a paper, be sure to start building your presentation with plenty of time to spare. You should ideally have the full presentation ready before you leave so that you can give a practice talk, allowing other people to give you feedback and help you improve the talk.
While at the actual conference, you should visit the speaker room prior to giving your talk. This will give you an opportunity to connect your laptop to a conference projector to make sure that your presentation and your computer are compatible. You will also have the chance to give a practice talk where you can get some colleagues to attend and give you pointers on improving the slideshow or your delivery.
Do not underestimate the need for practicing your talk. Make sure you have practiced it enough so that you know what to say without reading directly from a script (although some people like to have scripts when they are first mapping out their talk). Most importantly, make sure you have timed your talk and that you are well within the limits given to you. No one likes it when a speaker goes over the time, and sometimes the session chair may even interrupt you. Stick to your time limit!
Arriving at the Conference
You should typically plan to arrive at the conference the day before it starts. In many cases, the conference on-site registration will open the night before the actual event, so you will be able to go to the venue and get your materials. Be sure to make a note of where you are supposed to go and the opening times of the registration desk.
Your on-site conference package usually includes printed and/or electronic proceedings of the conference, a conference program, various information fliers about events and things in connection to the conference, and your name badge. Your name badge is one of the more important items — more on this below.
Spend some time the night before the conference starts to read through the important papers that you had spotted while preparing for the conference. You should try to do this every evening in preparation for the next day. This will give you a better idea of what the authors are trying to say and will make it easier to attend their presentation.
Your Name Badge
The name badge is proof that you are a registered conference attendee and should be worn at all times while attending the conference. Many times you will also wear it when you are off location while at lunch or dinner with other attendees. The badge is naturally great for putting names to faces, but also serves another important role — attendees with various functions at the conference usually get ribbons attached to their badges. Generally speaking, if you are an author of a paper at the conference you are attending, you should have a “Speaker” or “Presenter” ribbon — -be sure to ask for this when you register on the site if it is not part of your package. This ribbon may help strike up conversations about your work.
Beyond speaker ribbons, there are usually also other types of ribbons for other functions, including for program committee members, chairpersons, organizing committee members, and so on.
Dress Code
Conferences are generally not dressy affairs. Most people will wear basic work clothes and you will even see people in jeans. If you are a presenter, you might consider dressing up, but few people would wear a business suit. A suit is generally only necessary if you are interviewing at the conference, but very few conferences in computer science have special interview sessions.
These guidelines aside, you should always dress in clean and whole clothes. You are there to make a professional appearance, and you don’t want people to notice you for wearing something unconventional. At conferences we are supposed to be on our best behavior, and this includes dressing appropriately.
Networking
Why do we hold conferences? There is already a time-honored tradition of publishing results in journals, so why do we not just stick to this medium for all our publication needs? The answer has two parts: in computer science, we hold conferences because (a) they are supposedly faster than journals in getting results out to other researchers and practitioners, and (b) they allow for networking.
The first part of the answer may no longer be true. Journals used to take several years to review and publish a paper. In computer science, the choice was made several decades ago to turn to conferences for our publication needs because of this. However, this is no longer the case. In some fields like physics, the time from submission to publication can be as low as a month or two, and some even measure their turnaround time in weeks. Besides, arXiv has now become an accepted publication venue for many computer science subfields; post it on arXiv, and let the citations sort it out.
However, the second part of the answer is still true. Conferences, unlike journals, allow you to meet the authors in person, to ask them questions and give them feedback about their work, and to find potential collaborators for future research projects, grants, and service. One of the primary reasons you attend a conference should be to speak to other researchers working on the same or related research topics.
Starting to network on your own can be difficult, however, especially if you are not an extremely outgoing person. It can easily seem like everyone knows everyone else, and breaking into this community of people can be hard. Most of the time, you should be looking to get your advisor or existing acquaintances to introduce you and your work to other people. If you work at it, you will quickly start to establish a network of acquaintances of your own.
Confidentiality
Remember that conferences are great for exchanging ideas and theories, but sometimes you don’t want your ideas to be shared before you have had the time to work on them yourself. In other words, you should maintain confidentiality of your ongoing or planned work while attending a conference. This may seem paranoid, and there are very few researchers who would stoop to stealing other people’s ideas outright. However, if you tell someone about your brilliant new idea, directly or indirectly, you will probably be shaping their thoughts in your direction, and they may very well end up adopting a solution that is very similar to yours. Keep your cards close to your chest.
Some people may disagree with this guideline, claiming that knowledge should be freely available to everyone. Furthermore, ideas are cheap and require development before they are ready for consumption. One rule of thumb is to consider how much time you have invested into an idea before sharing it widely: if you just came up with the idea, there is little investment, but if you are staking your entire Ph.D. dissertation on an unpublished idea, you may want to keep it to yourself before it is published.
Of course, there is a fine balance between playing your cards close to your chest and exposing enough to find potential collaborators for future research. Conferences are excellent for identifying like-minded individuals who would love to work with you on a shared project. Keep an open mind.
Social Events
Most conferences have a number of social events scheduled to stimulate the networking and community aspects of the conference. These include coffee breaks, but often also a reception (the first evening of the conference) and a conference dinner or banquet. These events are excellent for networking and establishing friendships with peers at other institutions.
Behaving Professionally
Remember that you represent your university and your research group when attending a conference. Be sure to behave professionally at all times. The list of unprofessional behavior is long and is hopefully obvious to everyone. Keep in mind that you are, in fact, working when you attend a conference, and you do not really have an “off”-time except when you are alone in your hotel room. Behave accordingly.
Final Words
My experience is that attending an academic conference for the first time is the single most motivating thing you can do for a new student — if you have a prospective Ph.D. student who has been vacillating about starting a Ph.D., sending them to a conference will usually sway them. While papers and deadlines can often seem a bit abstract when you are toiling away hours on end in the comfort of your own lab, seeing the fruit of all that labor — presenting at a conference with hundreds if not thousands of other human beings — usually makes it real.
For me, conferences are one of the most enriching and enjoyable parts of being an academic. Going somewhere exotic to catch up with your long-time friends that you see only perhaps once or twice a year — what’s not to like? Of course, there are some practical issues to worry about, but once you have the routine down, it really is the closest us academics have to a vacation while still working.
