Maximize the benefit of Conference travel!

One of the best things you can do while travelling to a conference has nothing to do with the conference itself — visiting another University.

These days, with most airlines operating via a hub-and-spoke model, we rarely get direct flights to conferences. This is especially true if we live in small college towns or if most of the conferences we attend are overseas.

So why not visit a research group on your way to or from the conference?

Benefits

• Often the meetings you have visiting a University are far deeper and more meaningful than at a conference
• You get to visit laboratories/field sites and see their experimental setups in person.
• You get to see the same project through different lenses, meeting lab techs, undergrads, PhD students, postdocs and Professors
• You get to give a seminar to a usually quite large audience compared to a conference with multiple parallel sessions

Costs