Working as Research Assistant – The Dark Side

When I started sketching this post, I was sitting in the train to the airport in Düsseldorf. Today starts the Computing Conference 2018 in London, which I am attending. That means, that I flew to London today, will be giving a talk tomorrow and will be flying back on Wednesday. Three days of travelling to give a talk of 15 minutes! And the worst thing: I already know that I will not gain a thing from being here. That’s always the problem with large conferences, that are not centered around a specific topic.

Usually, I like traveling to conferences. Getting out for a few days, visiting interesting cities and meeting other researchers – sounds nice! But I realize that I get tired of being at conferences as often as I used to over the last years. In the last eight weeks alone, I’ve been to three conferences. Every time I have to interrupt my work in the office and to leave my family for a few days. Every time I return to Aachen, the mountain of work I still have to get done has gained another few inches. Every time I return to Aachen, my children have learned something new and I was not there to care for them. And for what? That answer is easy: For a Ph.D.

So, the question is: Is it really worth it? In general, the answer is yes. I chose to get a PhD – and I still stick with this decision – and that means, that I have to work scientifically. And not only is attending conferences for presenting and discussing ongoing work how science works, but – as I already said – going to conferences is fun most of the time. In the particular case that I described, I don’t think that three days of travel are worth it, considering a talk of 15 minutes. So, why am I here? The answer is easy: Because it’s an IEEE sponsored conference. That’s good for the academic record, they say – and therefore good for getting the PhD. And that’s the dark side, mentioned in the post’s title: It sometimes matters more who organizes a conference or publishes the paper in the end, than what target audience for the conference – and therefore the potential personal gain – is.

Where am I going with this post? I think publish or perish is a potential problem, especially for newly started PhD students, that do not (yet) know how all that „paper work“ is supposed to function. Personally, I think that quality should be weighted over quantity. And especially for PhD students, I think that every attendance to a conference should have a personal gain and that means, presenting the work to a specialized audience and getting into discussion afterwards (that’s in fact in line with the opinion of my PhD advisor, who is a great fan of doctoral consortia, which provide exactly that setting). Actually, the best conference I’ve ever been to was a very small conference. It had about thirty participants, only one track (no parallel sessions!) and a very well designed social activity in the evening.

So, my lessons for this post are:

  • Select the conferences that you are attending very carefully, not only by reputation
  • Allow yourself breaks in between conferences, you need to have something worth presenting and discussing

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