conference guilt

My broader field has a giant conference in December on the west coast and most people go there most years.

the number of attendees is between 15k and 20K
the number of buildings hosting events at the same time is between 4 and 6
the number of talks I missed while going from building to building/number of talks I saw >2
the number of hours I spent looking for people/number of hours I spent at talks > 3
the number of days of actual conference is 5
the number of days spent on this including traveling is 7
the cost of attending conference from the east coast -- 1.6k
the cost of attending conference from the west coast -- 1.5k

Every time I go there I have mixed feelings. I love going to conferences in general. I often get ideas and have started collaborations at such events too. I have gotten my data there too. but this last one felt deadly.

Too much noise, too much decision of what I can do at any given time, too many talks going ahead or behind schedule messing up my schedule, too many people who have morning posters but post they'd be a the poster in the afternoon or vice versa.

I got a few things accomplished. Someone more famous and further in their career like my adviser got a tons done mostly talking to Program Managers and the like.

Am I burning out? To some extent yes, but mostly not. I still love smaller conference in my subfield. The statistic for smaller conference is

the number of attendees is between 8k and 10K
the number of buildings hosting events at the same time is 1
the number of talks I missed while going from building to building/number of talks I saw =0 THIS IS BECAUSE THERE ARE <6 session at the same time, posters are at a different time than talks
the number of hours I spent looking for people/number of hours I spent at talks <1
the number of days of actual conference is 5
the number of days spent on this including traveling is 7
the cost of attending conference from the east coast -- 1.5k
the cost of attending conference from the west coast -- 1.6k

I get tons more done. I get to see whole sessions at time and most of the posters since the talks do not overlap posters. It is easy to predict where people are if there are 6 or fewer distinct sessions at which they could be. There are many rooms for conversation and collaboration. And the noise level is soooo much lower.

If I had a good choice I'd go for conference 2 only. But conference 1 is better for my CV. So there we go, tax payer cost roughly doubled.

I also find it disturbing that the conference on the west coast has almost the same cost regardless of where you live. This is due to the government rules for airplane tickets. Any normal being would find that all else being equal flying from the east coast to the west in the US should be more than hopping along the west coast (assuming similar sized airports which is the case). And this is true if I could have bought tickets from various places like the airlines, orbitz, yahoo travel, etc. But we have to go through an agency which buys tickets, charges us a ridiculous fee ($15 to $50) for booking and gets, in generally, not the lowest price I can quickly find.

As a tax payer I find this sad and appalling. If I ever get my own grant i'd stil find it appalling. But it gets worse. Two words:

per diem

As a grad student I didn't feel too bad to be honest. The school conveniently forgot to mention we pay the fees out of our own pocket when they offered us our financial aid and kept rising them by 50% to 100% every year. These fees ranged around 1 whole month paycheck so were not trivial. So the per diem I got from two conferences minus what I regularly spent on food (and I went out a lot) easily paid 100% of those fees at the beginning to 50% at the end. It urked me but I didn't care that much.

But now I have no excuse. And I felt very guilty today as I signed the paperwork as sent to me in one of our intermediary steps for reimbursement....

It gets worse; as a foreign person I know that for the same amount of money a person from my poor home country could attend. They'd stay at cheap motel, they'd eat sandwhcihes and other cheap food. Just for the opportunity.

On the bright side I did learn two things from our collaborator. Both of which fit on half a page of paper, could have been done over email and I have been asking for them for 1-2 months prior. But that is a whole other topic.