Travel & Attendance

• Finding and applying to conferences: Be active in finding conferences and external funding for attending conferences. For our group, the APS March Meeting, MRS Fall and Spring meetings, ACS meetings are relevant conferences; there are also many smaller conferences (like Gordon conferences) that happen, so keep your eyes peeled.

  • In general, be prepared with a brief justification for why a particular conference is worth attending (e.g., relevant session)

  • Wennie encourages room-sharing when attending conferences and being mindful of costs related to travel/hotel/food.

• Look out for conference travel funding: Both internal and external to the University. Apply!

• Ask questions: Asking questions helps you actively engage with the content and with the speaker. Once you start giving talks, you’ll quickly realize any question is better than no questions. And sometimes the speaker might mention an additional piece of information you might not have thought to ask about. Actively thinking of a question to ask helps you pay better attention to the seminar and much easier to remember.

  • In general, Wennie encourages everyone to ask questions, no matter how big or small. A useful article on why asking questions is good for you, the seminar speaker, and the audience; and how to go about it (https://totalinternalreflectionblog.com/2016/05/21/catechism-a-short-guide-to-asking-questions-in-seminars/). Side note: Wennie would personally not use some of the examples for prefacing questions (i.e., "This might be a dumb question" or "This is going to be a bit of a harsh question"); as long as you keep it professional and ask your question, there should be no problem. The webpage is specific to biology, but there are useful tidbits that cross-apply to engineering.

• Take notes and do a debriefing for the group: Be sure to give a couple of brief highlights to the group so we all can know what happened and what's recent!

Related paperwork

• Discuss with Wennie about the potential conference you are interested in

• Iterate with Wennie your abstract submission

• Fill out a request to travel at least two weeks from the travel dates: https://utdirect.utexas.edu/apps/services/requests/; email Wennie for the appropriate account number.

• Be familiar with the per diem for food and lodging; keep all receipts

• See ChE Intranet for more info

• When you return, fill out a travel reimbursement form: https://utdirect.utexas.edu/apps/services/requests/