How to go to a conference

Ben Rachunok · October 15, 2026

So you’re going to a conference. Congrats!!!

Remember, you can only do three things in grad school:

1. Do the great work.
2. Tell people about the great work you’re doing.
3. Look for new areas where you can do great work.

With that in mind, conferences are a great time to do #2 and #3.

This is my guide to getting the most out of conferences while also having a fun time. The ideas in this document were written over the past 10 years in iPhone notes on flights back from SRA, INFORMS, ISSST, AGU, and a whole host of others. It is half manifesto, half practical guide, and—in the later sections—half lab policy document.

General overview

What is a conference?

At its simplest, a conference is a gathering of researchers and practitioners in a given field. For a grad student, a conference is most likely a place to give a talk about your research and listen to other people talk about theirs.

The type of research, style of talks, and level of technical detail depend heavily on the conference. Some conferences in our area are very math heavy (INFORMS, SIAM, Wintersim). Others are policy and impact focused (SRA, ISSST). Some are interdisciplinary (DMDU). Some are, frankly, kind of for hanging out with your old friends from grad school.

Conferences also develop a vibe based on the people who regularly attend them. Most PIs I know have between one and four conferences that they regularly attend, depending on availability, overlap with other commitments, which students are presenting, and so on. I mention the people who attend conferences because ultimately…

You’re going to a conference to get your work in front of those people and to learn what they do.

This is a way to learn about and join your field and to get a feel for the people and perspectives that constitute it.

Procedurally, you usually submit an abstract or paper six to eight months in advance. Sometimes you submit on your own (a “contributed abstract”), and sometimes your talk is submitted as part of an organized session with several related presentations. In our area, a typical conference presentation is around 10–15 minutes.

The conference itself is usually three or four days. There are often keynote talks or plenary sessions—longer talks intended for most or all attendees—which tend to focus on big-picture, impactful, or controversial topics. There are also networking events, receptions, meals, and sometimes business meetings where people do the administrative work of running professional societies and planning future conferences.

Why do conferences exist?

Conferences are about sharing ideas, meeting people, and getting a sense of what is happening in a field.

Why not just email each other?

Well, we tried that during COVID, and most people hated it. Virtual conferences had one huge advantage: they dramatically expanded access for people who otherwise couldn’t attend. But they also demonstrated how difficult it is to reproduce the informal interactions that make conferences valuable. The scientific community (at least the parts I interact with) has largely swung back toward in-person meetings.

I think that says something important about scientific fields. Science is a deeply social activity. Papers are a formal record of scientific work, but a tremendous amount of science happens through conversations had with other scientists. For example, someone mentioning a method you hadn’t considered in a Q&A after your talk, meeting someone whose paper you’ve been reading for three years, hearing about a new research direction over a coffee break, or realizing during someone else’s talk that their idea solves a problem you’ve been stuck on.

That is the real reason to go to conferences.

What do you do at a conference?

Ultimately, you do a lot of grad-school activity #3 (finding new areas to do good work) and a bit of #2 (telling people about your own work), and hopefully you also have a few fun nights out and get to explore somewhere you haven’t been before.

Talk to people, introduce yourself, wear your nametag, and keep it facing outward so people can learn your name quickly. Ideally, you’re meeting lots of new people and leaving them with a positive impression. One day these people may review your papers, sit on committees awarding fellowships, serve on hiring committees, become collaborators, or invite you to give a talk.

It might not feel like it when you’re starting out, but academia is a remarkably small world. It is entirely feasible to attend the same medium-sized conference for ten years and eventually have a meaningful interaction with the vast majority of its regular attendees.

One takeaway from this is that conferences compound in value over time. Your first conference will be walking into a room full of strangers. Eventually, it becomes a room full of colleagues (and maybe friends!)

Before the conference

Find one!

Talk to people in your field (most likely, your advisor).

More specifically, look at programs from previous years. A conference program tells you who actually attends and what they actually talk about.

You might not recognize many of the presenters because they are often graduate students. Look at their coauthors and advisors. If the same researchers and research groups you read are repeatedly showing up, that’s probably a useful conference for you.

Submit something

The first step is, obviously, to submit the abstract or paper depending on the conference. Deadlines are typically six to eight months before the conference, and submitting an abstract can be a little onerous, so plan accordingly. Some require abstracts, some full papers. Some are very selective, some aren’t. Most conferences will also have some type of way to submit for an award or travel assistance, just keep note that process often requires an additional application.

There is a separate question here about presenting completed work versus work in progress. Both can be useful. A polished project gives you something strong to show people; earlier-stage work gives you an opportunity to get feedback while you can still do something with it. The important thing is knowing which one you’re presenting and tailoring the talk accordingly. I heard from a senior collaborator once that they knew they were senior when they could write their abstracts on fully published papers and never had to scramble to get something done. For a grad student, it’s okay to leave some work not finished but it’s always a stressful thing to risk.

You will then hear (usually via email) a few months later if you were accepted or not, and if you are (congrats), register and make travel arrangements.

Finish everything else before you leave

Rule: Don’t bring homework to a conference.

A personal rule of mine that I’ve developed over time: Before you go to the conference, finish your homework, schoolwork, research deliverables, paper submissions, talk preparation, poster creation, forms, travel authorizations, and whatever else is hanging over your head (grading is a big one for me).

Ask any of my students whether I obey this rule myself and they will laugh and call me a hypocrite. They are correct; I am horrible at it.

However, as a graduate student you generally have more control over your deadlines, and I think you should treat this as a hard-and-fast rule. (One perk of the faculty job is gaining the ability to overload yourself with deadlines to your heart’s content).

The reason is simple: your time at a conference is extremely valuable.

You don’t want to get invited to dinner with someone interesting, meet a potential future employer, or stumble into some unexpected fun time and have to say, “Sorry, I need to go back to my hotel room and finish my homework.”

For academics old and new, conferences are your Super Bowl. You spend months doing work with the chance to present it and getting yourself into a place where interesting people in your field have all agreed to congregate. Take advantage of it.

During the conference

Go to talks. But don’t measure the success of the conference by the number of talks you attend.

A fantastic conversation in the hallway can be more valuable than sitting through another session because you feel obligated to maximize your conference efficiency. The talks create the structure around which the rest of the conference happens.

If someone asks you to get coffee, get coffee. If a group is going to dinner, go to dinner. If you meet someone working on something fascinating, ask them questions. If somebody introduces you to someone you’ve wanted to meet, don’t immediately disappear because the next session has started. The conference program is more of a guideline.

That being said, actually go to talks. Having fun, sightseeing, being a tourist is fun, but you’re at a conference to advance your career. Don’t let that get lost in the adventure of a new place.

Especially for bigger conferences, I spend an hour a few weeks beforehand and make a “pre-conference plan” (see below), so I know where to go, who I want to see etc.

Attitude and Behavior

Conference Rule: Be friendly to everyone no exceptions

I cannot emphasize this enough. From the moment you leave your office to begin traveling until the moment you return: do not say one single negative word about anyone. Keep those opinions bottled right up.

You have no idea who knows whom. You don’t want to complain about a conference lunch and discover that the person you’re talking to organized it. You don’t want to make fun of a talk and discover that you’re sitting next to the speaker’s advisor. More importantly, there is never anything to be gained by being the person at a conference who complains about other people (one exception, see below). ‘Don’t shit-talk others’ is a good life rule across the board, but it’s absolutely mandatory in an academic setting.

Be generous. Be curious. Be enthusiastic about other people’s work. Ask questions in good faith. Make people happy that they met you. Your attitude is a chance to make someone else feel accepted, to learn something new, and to help others succeed alongside you.

There is one important exception: problematic or inappropriate behavior. If you’re in my group, we bring our culture of excellence, full support for one another, and zero tolerance for intolerance everywhere we go. Being positive does not mean ignoring behavior that makes people unsafe, unwelcome, or disrespected. Every conference I’ve been to has a way to report someone being inappropriate. This can take many forms and shouldn’t be taken lightly. Some people (wrongly) believe that because you’re outside the office, you don’t have to be professional, and academia needs to have zero tolerance for that.

One kind of touchy aspect of this is alcohol. I’ve never been to a conference that didn’t have at least a cash bar at something, so it may feel like drinking is encouraged. I’m of the opinion that it’s fine to drink at conferences but—especially at official events—stay well within your established limits. Use your good judgment and err on the side of caution.

After the conference

Give yourself some time to recover. Conferences are kind of a lot. You have probably spent several days walking around, listening carefully, presenting, meeting strangers, drinking too much coffee, staying out later than usual, eating weirdly, and being “on” for much more of the day than you normally are.

Then, after you’ve recovered for a day or two, start your follow-ups.

Rule: always send follow ups

If someone gave you a paper, read it. If you promised to send something, send it. If you had a particularly good conversation, a short “great meeting you” email is completely reasonable. If you came home with three new research ideas, write them down before normal life eats them. I typically leave conferences wiped physically, but very jazzed intellectually and as soon as you get back make sure you capture as much of that energy as you can.

A note on travel

If you can, arrive a day early.

Beyond reducing the chance that a delayed flight ruins your presentation, this gives you time to settle in, figure out the conference venue, and explore the city a little before the conference starts.

It is also worth learning how to be a good traveler. This isn’t a universal experience, but most academics I know eventually acquire the trappings of competent business travelers: TSA PreCheck, frequent-flyer accounts, strong opinions about direct flights, a system for packing, strategies for eating reasonably well on the road, etc.

You will probably travel a lot in this career. Getting good at it makes life substantially easier.

My lab-specific policies on conferences

Everything above is general advice. Everything below is specifically how I think about conferences for our research group.

Conferences I currently think are worthwhile

These are my opinions and are subject to change.

• SRA: The king.
• INFORMS: Very good, but enormous. Particularly valuable for students approaching the job market.
• IISE: Right now, primarily for particularly good locations, awards, or when we have additional travel funding.
• ISSST: Fun and relevant, although generally not urgent.
• SRA Europe: More social-science focused than SRA, but very good.

Conference support

For my students, I will generally pay for each student to attend one conference per year and will support additional conferences as funding and opportunities allow.

You must apply for any and all relevant conference and university travel grants. Any external support you receive makes it easier for me to support additional travel.

When I have funding available to send students to additional conferences, I will generally prioritize:

1. Students who are close to entering the job market.
2. Students with highly polished work that is ready to be shown.
3. Students who can clearly articulate why attending a particular conference would be valuable.

Those priorities are roughly in that order.

The exception is particularly expensive international conferences—SRA-E, ESREL, EGU, etc. I will try my best to support every student in attending a “fun conference” at least once. If you can secure roughly 50% of the necessary funding through external travel grants or other sources, I will generally try to find the rest.

Before you go

Abstract submission

Whenever possible, try to be part of an invited or organized session.

I need your abstract two weeks before the submission deadline.

And by “submission deadline,” I mean the actual submission. Before giving me the materials, go through the submission portal as though you were submitting everything, stopping only before the final submission/payment step.

Conference websites love surprises. Sometimes there is another essay. Sometimes the travel-grant application requires an additional document. Sometimes the abstract has a completely different word limit than advertised elsewhere. Whatever the portal requires, I want the complete package two weeks in advance.

Posters

Posters are mandatory whenever the conference allows you to present both a talk and a poster.

If you have to choose one, the talk is preferred. But if you can give a talk and present a poster, you need to do both. They can cover the same work.

Talks are excellent for broadcasting your work. Posters are excellent for actually talking to people about it.

Deliverables before leaving

Before you leave:

• Your talk should be completely finished, practiced, and signed off on by me or another designated senior lab member.
• Your poster should be completely finished and either printed or sent to someone at the destination for printing.
• Your conference-planning form should be complete.

The conference-planning report/email

The conference planning form/report is a bit of homework that (I think) will help you get the most from a conference. The materials in this are things I’ve found are helpful after a decade of doing this. The form should include:

1. Your overall schedule. Arrival, departure, registration, meals, conference events, and anything else with a fixed time. Identify which meals the conference provides and which periods are open for you to make plans with other people. If there is a graduate-student breakfast, put it on the schedule. If there is a new-member networking dinner, put it on the schedule. You want this to be a living document that you can reference for where to go and what to do for everything except talks.

2. Talks you want to attend. This is a lot of work. It is absolutely worth doing.

For SRA or ISSST, you can probably go through the entire program in a half hour. For INFORMS, you will need to identify relevant tracks first and work from there.

For each talk, record:

• Date and time
• Location
• Speaker
• Short description of the talk
• Why you want to attend

The reason might be the content, the method, a famous researcher you want to hear, a completely new area you’re curious about, or something that could be useful for your own research.

You will not be able to attend everything. Doing this work beforehand means you can make those choices intentionally instead of standing in a convention-center hallway scrolling through a 300-page program on your phone.

I typically make an iPhone note in chronological order so I can see where I might want to go at any given time. Lots of conferences now have apps where you can save talks in a schedule. Great idea to use that.

3. People you want to meet. This may be the most important part, and I want you to share this with me early. Once you’ve identified interesting talks, identify people who:

• Are giving talks you find particularly interesting.
• Are prominent in your research area.
• Could be potential future employers, collaborators, reviewers, etc.
• Are simply doing work you think is cool and want to know more about.

For each person, tell me:

• Who they are.
• Their title, university, and department.
• If they’re a graduate student, who their advisor is.
• What they generally work on.
• Why you want to meet them.

A spreadsheet is fine. I need this a few weeks ahead of time because, if I’m doing my job correctly as an advisor, I know at least some of these people. I can send a pre-conference email, introduce you directly, or make a point of finding them at the conference.

I work very hard to know people in our field and cultivate a positive reputation. Part of the reason is that it helps me do my job as a researcher. A much bigger reason is that I can pass that social capital on to you.

4. Two to five nearby coffee shops, bars, and restaurants. Find places reasonably close to the conference that can accommodate a spontaneous group of five to eight people, preferably without a reservation and with enough options for different dietary preferences.

We want to do this beforehand because at 5:17 p.m., when the last session ends and eight people are standing around saying, “Where should we go?”, you can be the person who says, “There’s a place two blocks away that looks good.”

That sounds like an incredibly minor thing but having ideas of places to go beforehand has saved me a half dozen times. At bigger conferences like AGU/INFORMS, the restaurants within 3 blocks of the conference center will get swamped during every big break, just keep it in mind.

5. A map of the conference Make sure you know the lay of the land for where talks can be located. INFORMS and AGU especially can be across multiple buildings in big convention centers and you don’t want to miss out on something because you got lost on the way. I typically print these out.

Conclusion

This feels like a lot, and it is! But when it comes to sharing your research with others and learning about your field, attending conferences is really as good as it gets. You spend a lot of time doing good work and writing good papers so make sure to take the chance to share that with the world seriously.