Conferences are great. Your university, government lab, or company sends you on a free trip to a (hopefully) interesting locale. There are engaging talks and poster sessions, chances to sight see, and even the prospect of the sampling the night life with some of your colleagues. When I was a graduate student, conferences felt almost like a vacation. Of course, you do not go to a conference to (just) have fun.
The people sending you to that conference, for example, are not interested in giving you a free vacation. Their motivation revolves around ongoing education, intelligence gathering, and brand building. No one wants the people working for them to fall behind the times technically or work in ignorance of what the competition is up to. Making a strong showing at the right conferences is also a key element of any groups’ efforts to establish and maintain a presence and positive reputation in their community, which are key factors in attracting funding and new recruits. So, your employer would really like you to learn as much as you can and do a solid job giving your own presentations and posters.
Taken together, the twin objectives of doing your job and having some fun form the basic approach to conference attendance. There is nothing wrong with this basic approach (which I followed for years), but you can get even more out of the time you spend at a conference with a few advanced strategies. This gradually dawned on me over time as I saw how the more successful scientists played the conference game and I gained experience with non-science types and how they approached conventions and professional events. The key paradigm shift lies in understanding that the primary value of a conference lies not in learning new science and technology, which you could also accomplish in other ways, but in building relationships with fellow scientists and engineers. Those relationships provide you with future collaborators, employers, and employees, and are huge assets in the game of building and maintaining a scientific career. With that in mind, here are some of my concrete strategies that you can use to maximize the relationship building potential of your time at a conference:
- Spend More Time at the Posters than the Talks – Talks are great (at least they can be), but they are fundamentally passive and not that much different from reading a good paper on the same subject. In the poster sessions, however, there are live experts standing around willing to answer your questions about all the issues and details that do not make it into the papers and formal presentations. That is a rare and highly valuable opportunity with the added bonus of making a new acquaintance at the same time.
- Don’t Read the Posters – The only time I actually read a poster is when the presenter is not there for some reason. If they are, then I just ask them to give me the quick tour of what they are presenting. I find that I learn more, and learn it faster, this way while simultaneously building a new relationship or strengthening an old one. Maybe this point seems obvious, but it apparently isn’t. I often see presenters standing there in awkward silence while a passerby reads the poster. That looks like a lost opportunity to me.
- Ask About Your Visitors – The flip side of the preceding rule is taking an interest in the people who stop at your poster and asking them what they do, where they are from, etc. Do not make it just about you and the work you are presenting, or you might pass up the chance to make an important connection. I have had multiple experiences talking to people at their poster, people who I was potentially interested in hiring, who never inquired about who I was or what I worked on and lost the chance of getting to know me and following up later.
- Go to the Receptions and Banquet – I am occasionally guilty of violating this principle, but it is a good idea to go to as many of the conference’s social event as you can. These are excellent venues for meeting new people in a more casual setting. I have also noticed that the cocktails often present at these event can help grease the social wheels.
- Sit with Strangers – Ever look around the tables at a conference banquet or other function? Odds are you will see people sitting with the same colleagues they see every day back at their home institutions. That is perfectly natural tribal human behavior, but it does not maximize the value of the opportunity. I make a point of sitting with new people, or at least those I rarely see, at formal conference events. There is time enough to spend with friends and colleagues afterwards or back home.
- Plan Your Dance Card – When I started going to conferences, I literally had no plan, other than managing to show up for the session I was presenting in. Now, I will often have multiple private meetings and the events that I really want to go to scheduled in detail well in advance. Leaving things to chance is not the most effective approach when you really want to get as much out of a conference as possible. There is usually plenty of time between when the agenda is finalized and you know who is attending and the actual conference. Use this time to identify the key people you would like to meet and set up lunches, coffee, dinners, and chats in advance. Interested in working in Professor Smith’s lab next year? Write her an email and see if she will sit down with you for fifteen minutes at the conference. She is very likely to say “yes.” As with most things, going into a conference with a clear plan of action multiplies the value you get out of the event.
- Follow Up – If you make even a half-hearted stab at tips one through six above, then you will meet a lot of new people at your conference. It is a good idea to follow up with as many of these new contacts as possible after you get home. There are many options: send a nice-to-meet-you email, invite them to connect on LinkedIn, send a copy of the paper you discussed, ask a question that came to mind since meeting them, etc. Little things go a long way in cementing the nascent professional relationships you just started.