Conferences are pretty great. In particular chatting to people in person gives you a way of finding the information that isn’t optimised for in the journal publication system, such as the things someone tried that didn’t work out, or didn’t end up publishable.
I like encouraging outsiders to go to conferences, but I would strongly caveat that you should be an outsider who at least has some related expertise knowledge. If you go to a chemistry conference with no knowledge of chemistry (or overlapping fields like physics and material science), the vast majority of talks and posters will be incomprehensible to you, and you won’t know enough to ask insightful questions. Even for an experienced insider, talks from a different subfield can be completely useless because you don’t have the necessary background knowledge to make sense of them.
I find the most interesting/valuable talks/posters are the ones that are in my field and share a bit with my research, but are off in a different direction, so I’m being exposed to very new ideas, but still have the background to engage.
Conferences are pretty great. In particular chatting to people in person gives you a way of finding the information that isn’t optimised for in the journal publication system, such as the things someone tried that didn’t work out, or didn’t end up publishable.
I like encouraging outsiders to go to conferences, but I would strongly caveat that you should be an outsider who at least has some related expertise knowledge. If you go to a chemistry conference with no knowledge of chemistry (or overlapping fields like physics and material science), the vast majority of talks and posters will be incomprehensible to you, and you won’t know enough to ask insightful questions. Even for an experienced insider, talks from a different subfield can be completely useless because you don’t have the necessary background knowledge to make sense of them.
I find the most interesting/valuable talks/posters are the ones that are in my field and share a bit with my research, but are off in a different direction, so I’m being exposed to very new ideas, but still have the background to engage.