The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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Any guides or advice for attending academic conferences? I'm a late bloomer in that regard so I haven't gone to a "real" conference before - nothing national or with much significance. I know, generally, that you go and listen to talks and "network", but that's far from a complete understanding. I feel like social norms in academia are so opaque. I don't want to be clueless upon arrival.
As tempting as it is to socialize with the people you know at a conference (fellow attendees from your organization, most likely), I'd recommend you at least make an effort to talk to someone new (daily?). It'll vary based on field, but "what is your research interest?" or "are you presenting? Tell me about your topic" are pretty evergreen. Some conferences provide meals, which I've found to be a good time for this. I'd expect many/most of these attempts to go nowhere (maybe they're a vendor of something you don't need), but the practice of talking about it and making connections is useful, and sometimes you learn something or meet someone interesting. If you want to be particularly savvy, find a paper/presentation that sounds interesting to you and try to chat with the specific author/speaker.
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