edgar wrote:
> as a suggestion, conferences could include some papers from students
> who can't afford to travel.
I sympathise with this but it undermines the main value of networking
and I think we need to be more creative.
Three ways forward come to my mind.
First, one person's long haul event is another's regional conference. I
realise that there are problems especially in Australia and New Zealand
and we are very lucky in Europe but one answer is for that community to
make sure that students have access to at least one worthwhile
conference a year in their own backyard.
To complement that there is a lot of scope for consortia of universities
to run student conferences, we've had some experience of that and it is
a good way to increase the opportunities to present your work, and there
is some scope to make them quite broadly interdisciplinary to
everybody's benefit. My first real academic conference was about medical
physics and I learned a lot of general stuff that translated into my
own work.
Finally, we have not really thought hard about online or multi-site
conferences but I feel that has to be a big development once sufficient
places have conferencing spaces linked to the grid. Apart from anything
else academics can't keep on racking up the carbon miles as we do today,
no matter how much we enjoy it.
best
Chris
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