Science conferences are amazing experiences! You get the inside information on all of the latest experiments in your field. Not to mention networking opportunities like no other. At these conferences, you can ask methodological and research design questions to the researchers who wrote those papers you’ve been reading for years. You also benefit from hearing about not-yet-published data so you don’t waste your time conducting an experiment that someone else has already done. If nothing else, I always come back from conferences with the creative juices flowing for future investigations, inspired by the work of my colleagues and scientific heroes.
Read more about the largest neuroscience conference in the world, SfN, in my article on That’s Life [Science].
Science by Emma Dauster 