Should I stay or should I go?
Written by
Howy JacobsWith the pandemic well behind us, it has become common once again for us academics to travel to conferences, collaborations and courses. But at the same time travelling seems far more difficult than it used to be. How do we juggle these competing needs and constraints?
On balance, I think travelling to conferences, both to major congresses and even small workshop meetings, is important – if not essential – for career development at just about every level. It’s especially the case for PhD students and postdocs located in small peripheral countries like Finland, and this obviously includes also Australasia and even some parts of North America that are relatively isolated. It’s really the only way to develop a broad understanding of what is going on in the field, and check-out potential future collaborators, supervisors and also students of one’s own. One colleague recently mentioned to me that they don’t go to conferences because they don’t really know anyone in their field personally. But this is obviously a circular argument. What better way to meet those colleagues than attend the meetings of the field? And once a face and a voice can be put to your name, you are far more likely to be invited to speak in your own right.
But there is also a downside to travel, which has actually become more expensive and more of a hassle than say 10 or 20 years ago. Fares have gone up considerably, and dynamic pricing makes it really hard to know when or how to book. Airlines have started charging for baggage – even cabin bags, for catering and for seats, often at ridiculously high prices compared with the base fare. If you don’t mind sitting in a middle seat for 8 hours and bringing your own sandwiches it’s obviously a waste of money, and the sponsor might not even cover it. But personally I feel constrained to pay the extra anyway. Getting through airports remains a challenge: security is a bit more efficient in some places, while many others, with less fancy scanners and less well trained staff, still subject passengers to long waits and repeated searches. Being obliged regularly to use the same lousy airport, congested highway, or chronically unreliable rail service can induce a feeling of intense nausea that might be called ‘economy-class syndrome’.
Most major countries have now introduced advance travel authorization schemes. Generally these cost only a few dollars, but some countries charge exorbitant extras: New Zealand, for example, now requires payment of a $100 conservation tax in addition to the basic fee. There are also snares for the unwary. If you end up on a cleverly disguised third-party website, instead of that of the official government service, you can end up paying ten times the official fee. I fell for one of these scams myself when visiting Canada last year. Some countries, especially the USA, can reputedly demand intrusive details of one’s social media history, and horror stories have been circulated of bona fide travellers detained for hours while their phone or laptop is forensically screened for any trace of anti-government sentiment. You might even be denied entry. Too bad if, like me, you have put your name to stridently worded blogposts or editorials. In the EU the new entry/exit system at the Schengen border is reputedly causing enormous and unnecessary delays, even if you know which lane to use to get through the inspection gates. As a permanent resident of foreign nationality I rarely do, and even the immigration officers themselves don’t always know.
It’s also easy to overlook the time taken – not just in reaching a remote destination and recovering from fatigue and jetlag, but also in all the preparation. Did you remember to send that 150-word biosketch, high-resolution portrait photo and an abstract of your talk or poster that conforms to strict formatting guidelines that you couldn’t even locate? Or did you send them already, just not through the official meeting portal? How much time did you waste finding a flight and connecting travel at sensible times of day and reasonable cost? Even if those costs are recoverable, it will be charged to your grant. After the meeting you still have to file your expenses claim, sometimes to multiple sponsors or, in extremis, the tax authorities. And the meeting’s feedback form. And documented compensation claims for your cancelled flight, missed connections, lost bag and so on. And if we are lucky enough to have attended a meeting it’s not unreasonable to expect us to report to our own research group on what was presented – another time-consuming add-on.
A further negative is what I might call conference-circuit addiction: the feeling that if one doesn’t attend every single event of the field one’s work will somehow be overlooked, that citations and positive reviews of job applications will drop, manuscripts will get rejected and the academic world will just pass you by. Not to mention the accompanying burnout and disruption to family life, even just the suspicions of a partner who wonders why you seem to be away so often. Keeping conference attendance in proportion seems hard for many, even when it would be far better for all concerned to send more junior associates in your place. Going to one or two main meetings a year should be enough to keep in touch.
Despite all, I think the benefits greatly outweigh the inconvenience. Meeting and exchanging views with colleagues, especially the ones you never met before, cannot be substituted by email or webcam tools. In spite of the tedium and anxiety of early starts, late arrivals, long delays and tight connections, visiting new places is invigorating, even if there is little time to visit places of interest or nice restaurants. And even if research grants nowadays allocate little if anything for travel, it’s still worth haggling with the head of department or institute director for financial support, at least to cover the basics of meeting registration and actually getting there. Budget-holders who read this blog probably won’t thank me for saying that. But academic careers demand far more than just spending long hours in the lab, staring at a screen or marking exams.
