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.
No email address required.
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Yes, this approach is a possibility if you are attending a conference to tick a box.
I'd advise against it if you want to succeed in academia, however. Take the following with a caveat that it comes from someone who failed at that game.
Theoretically / in the mythic past, the point was to hear about new ideas and all the minor details that won't get published in the journals or before it is published, and made your own work "known", avoid getting insular as due to talking about your ideas to people you already know, and perhaps find someone who works on something you can collaborate with. In practice / in recent decades, the feeling I got was much less collegial and more mercenary and superficial: many people lie a little bit in order to advertise their work if they can get away with it, because every contact you make is a possibility of your work getting cited. Everyone, even the less scrupulous, is there to find potential co-authors or people to organize a workshop with (CV padding) or job opportunities (people to send your CV to, if you ever need to) or because someone ordered them to be there (clueless CV padding). (Some might be there to try to get something out of presentations, but whenever I did so, I felt it was a losers game and inefficient use of time. Successful ones spent their time social butterflying through them.) Manners and presentation-wise, in general, you want to make a good impression as in any other social event.
The Motte informs me that high-grade LLMs can increasingly do serious scientific work these days, so the social proof aspect of the insular ivory tower social club is going to be more important.
I hate my corporate day-job but I hate it less than academia. On the other hand, I hate the regular "corporate" networking, too, because I don't understand it properly, and it isn't that different either.
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