Blog – A Beginner’s Guide to Preparing for a Big Conference

Conferences can be among the most exciting events of the research calendar – but also the most stressful. On the one hand, they can be a chance to travel to cool places, see exciting new science, gain useful feedback, and catch up with old friends. However, from having your work scrutinised to networking with the highfliers in your field and coping with an intense schedule, conferences can also be a lot to handle.

How can you make the most of them? (Especially if you’re on the introverted end of the social spectrum). Here are some of my strategies that I hope can help you too!

1. Figuring out your Schedule

The conference itself, especially bigger meetings that are packed with people, posters, and parallel sessions, is going to be hectic. There are usually more talks that you can possibly see and more people than you can reasonably meet. It pays to look through the conference programme in detail ahead of the conference and figure out the following:

• What do you want to get out of the conference? Are you trying to get feedback on your work? Stay up to date with the field? Learn some new techniques? Find a job? Advertise your research and get some collaborations? Do some soul searching (or whatever else you need to do) to work out why you’re going to the meeting and what you want to get out of it. Then use this to guide your schedule and prioritise.
• What poster presentations do you want to try and see? Unless it’s a small meeting, you probably won’t have time to walk past all the posters, and even if you do, it’s unlikely that you’ll find the presenter with it at the same time you’re there. Go through the abstract booklet ahead of time and make a list. If there’s a conference app that allows you to message attendees, reach out to the ones you’re most interested in and arrange a time to meet. If you’re really keen, emailing/tweeting/LinkedIn-ing in advance can help too.
• What talks do you want to try and see? This is seemingly less important for smaller meetings where there is only a single stream of talks, but it can be useful to know in advance when the talks are that you really want to go to and pay attention to are, and when you can take a mental break. For conferences with parallel sessions, this is essential. You will not have time on the day to figure out what you want to go to, and judging by session title / talk title alone is often a bad strategy – sometimes a talk sounds interesting but actually it wasn’t that relevant to you, and other times you may overlook a talk that actually had some really important insights or discusses a useful technique that wasn’t in the title, or is from a lab you’re interested in! Having a glance beyond the heading at the abstracts can be useful.
• What else do you want to try and do during the conference? Whether it’s slipping in some sightseeing, talking to the exhibitors, attending a workshop, or anything else interesting the conference has going on, make sure you plan ahead to make time for it. Don’t trust future you to find it or make time for it amid the conference chaos.

Sorting this all out in advance can take a long time, but it makes a huge difference for me and my ability to go in with a plan and enjoy the conference in a low stress manner, and not get too overwhelmed with everything going on. Going in mentally prepared for the big days can make a big difference. Some conferences have apps with a scheduling or agenda function that can be useful, but I personally like (digitally) drawing out my full schedule with all the things I might want to do in each timeslot (priority + alternatives), so I can see it all laid out neatly. Don’t forget that amid everything else, you should make sure you have time to eat, and for everything I’ve said about planning ahead, make sure you give yourself some time to just roam around and soak it all in too. Programming in plenty of flexible time can often come in handy and you’ll thank your past self for it.

2. Accept you Can’t Take On Everything

I used to have the attitude that to make the most of a conference I had to pay attention to every talk, read every poster, and pick up as much information as possible. By the afternoon of day 2 in a packed conference, this is no longer possible. Give yourself breaks in between sessions or know which talks you can check out from to be able to take a mental break and recover your attention. Give yourself the time and capacity to make the most of the parts of the conference that are important to you (and as per the previous section, make sure you’ve done the preparation to work out what parts those are). Big marathon conferences can run 12-hour days for 3-5 days. Accept that taking that much information in, as interesting as it might be, is not going to happen, and prioritise. This will also help make sure you have enough of your wits still with you so that you can sound mostly intelligible when you’re meeting people.

3. Strategies to Networking

Networking always feels a bit icky and uncomfortable because it can seem instrumentalising and superficial, but the best advice I’ve heard on this is to flip it around imagine if someone came up to you and asked you about your research or wanted your advice. How would you feel? Overjoyed at someone showing interest in your work and happy to help, I would hope! This reframing, and the reminder that people at a conference are there explicitly because they want to try and meet and talk to people and hear about cool new things going on, helped me become a lot more comfortable with this. Nevertheless, talking to strangers, especially the big name super smart important scary professor types can still be a daunting prospect. Once again, I recommend having a plan.

First, figure out who is going to be at the conference and whom you might want to meet. Don’t do what I did and find yourself talking to someone without knowing who they are and only realising too late they’re actually an important collaborator and only have inane questions to ask them. Especially when it comes to international people whom you may not get access to very often if ever again, makes sure you’re caught ready.

Find the attendees list or look through the abstract booklet for people whom you know, people from labs or institutions you’re interested in, or people associated with topics you’re interested in. Have a scroll through the invited speakers and their bios, work out who they are and why they’re important, and if you think you might want to talk to them, go have a glance at some of their papers too and put a face to their name so you can recognise them at the conference and tap them on the shoulder if needed.

Until I got more practiced at doing this on the fly, I would literally write down several questions to ask people, both generic things I was interested in, and specific questions for particular people based on their research area or their talk, just to make sure I remembered everything and came across as sensible. (To be honest, I still do this sometimes).

Research conducted by myself et al. (2023) has shown that the longer a conference goes on, the less likely your brain is to work properly (N=1 plus anecdotes). Given this, go in with notes, go in with a plan, and don’t be afraid to take notes when chatting too. Ideally use a pen and paper for this as it feels less rude and more inconspicuous than typing into a phone or laptop while talking to someone, and you can do it without breaking the flow of conversation. This way you’ll be more confident and won’t be wasting their time or yours.

This blog post is already long enough without going into detail about presenting your own research, but it is worth mentioning to have prepared ways of describing your own work – the one sentence version, the 20 second version, the 1-minute version. Ideally, make it modular – have bits and pieces you can add on as necessary that you can tailor to suit the person you’re talking to, and bring up the parts they’ll find most interesting or relevant sooner. This needs to be logical, clear, and thought through, so worth doing in advance.

Final note: If you have the opportunity to talk to someone, take it then and there, don’t assume you’ll be able to catch them later. The best time is usually right after they’ve given a talk when people are often happy to hang around and answer questions. Don’t rely on them hanging around for the whole day or you bring able to find them in a big conference later. Incidentally, asking a public question after a talk is usually another good way of getting yourself noticed or being remembered.

4. Rest/Consolidation Time Afterwards

The last note I want to make about getting the most out of conferences is to remind you to make sure you schedule in time to rest and consolidate – both during and after the conference. Especially after a long meeting, you will be exhausted, so avoid planning a major day of experiments for the next morning, for example. What can be useful to do, while it’s all fresh, is to make sure you schedule time after the conference to consolidate your notes and put together a brief summary of your main learnings and take aways. Conferences are a flood of information, and between talks, posters, conversions, workshops, networking, and whatever else happens, it will all be a garbled mess. Take the time to sort through it, make a summary of things you want to remember or look into more, digitise your scrawled incoherent jottings before you forget what they mean, and reflect on what you’ve learned. Sending a brief follow up message to people you talked to is good practice as well. Consolidation is an important part of the remembering process and future you will thank you for it.

Conclusion:

By now, you can probably see the theme of my approach: Planning makes perfect. Conferences are complete chaos and given you’re probably either paying a lot of money to be there or somoene is paying a lot of money for you to be there, you really want to make the most of it. I find going in with a plan and being mentally prepared is the best way to avoid being completely overwhelmed by everything, and I’ve come to really enjoy most conferences now that I know what to expect. Don’t forget that almost everyone else there is probably also a keen but nervous bean, and that you’re all really excited about and interested in the same thing – which is kind of cool when you think about it.

Ajantha Abey

Author

Ajantha Abey is a PhD student in the Kavli Institute at University of Oxford. He is interested in the cellular mechanisms of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other diseases of the ageing brain. Previously, having previoulsy explored neuropathology in dogs with dementia and potential stem cell replacement therapies. He now uses induced pluripotent stem cell derived neurons to try and model selective neuronal vulnerability: the phenomenon where some cells die but others remain resilient to neurodegenerative diseases.

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