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Attending Conferences

Attending conferences and workshops is valuable whether you present a paper or not. Some of the reasons to do so are:

• You'll meet people and have a chance to discuss your ideas and to hear theirs.
• You'll get a good sense of what the current state of research is, and will learn more about how to write conference papers and give talks (sometimes by counterexample).
• You'll probably realize that your ideas are more significant, relatively speaking, than you thought. A common reaction is ``I could write a better paper than this!''

If you're giving a talk you'll gain even more visibility, and will have an opportunity to make an impression on other researchers. Some tips for preparing your talk to make this impression as positive as possible:

• Give a practice talk, especially if you tend to get stage fright. Be sure to invite people who will give you constructive, but useful, feedback.
• Make sure your talk fits in the time slot allocated. There's nothing worse than a speaker who rushes through the last ten slides, or skips from the middle of the talk to the conclusion. A good rough rule is to allocate 2-3 minutes per slide, on average.
• It's better to be somewhat abstract than to get bogged down in technical details -- but be sure you give enough detail to make a convincing case. Your paper should fill in the missing details, so that people can read it to get a more in-depth understanding. Know your audience: you'll have to give more background to a general audience, and more technical detail to audiences that are very familiar with the field of research you're discussing.
• Use examples and pictures to illustrate and clarify your ideas.
• Learn by observation: try to imitate qualities of talks that you like, and avoid things that other speakers do that bother you.
• Talk about your ideas informally whenever you get the chance, so that the talk will come more naturally and, hopefully, you'll have a chance to respond to and think about questions that might get asked at the talk.
• Make sure your slides are readable and as simple as possible. Never put up a slide with tiny text and say ``I know you can't read this, but...''
• Try to relax. Don't read from a script or word-for-word from your slides, and don't talk too fast. Be confident: you know more about your work (flaws and all) than anyone else.