It’s been suggested to me by some graduate students that there may be something pernicious about hosting graduate conferences and asking graduate students to submit papers to them. The argument goes that there seems to be a disproportionate benefit to the department hosting the conference relative to the graduate students who participate in the conference.

Departments, especially very junior graduate students, gain the following by hosting graduate conferences:

• Growth in departmental culture by giving a shared project to graduate students that ends with a multi-day social event; the conference¹
• Low-stakes experience for graduate students in reviewing papers, writing commentaries, chairing sessions
• Small CV additions for students in terminal Masters programs (e.g. “chaired the conference committee”; “presented a commentary”)

But, while we find it worthwhile to host the conference, a question always crops up for us while we review the submitted papers: Who are these students submitting to our conference? The reason for our curiosity is that is generally considered conventional wisdom to avoid submitting papers to graduate conferences. The reason is that the benefits of going to conferences in general are as follows:

• Feedback from experts in your field on your research
• Networking with those same experts
• Small CV addition (at least it shows you did the “research thing” and shopped your paper around before publishing it)

The problem is that none of these benefits are really offered at a graduate conferences. There are no experts in your field, there are graduate students and the few faculty that show up, all in disparate fields. Thus, the feedback you get will be from a bunch of people who are likely in way worse positions for giving feedback than you are sitting alone at your computer; you’re closer to an expert, after all.² And the networking that offered to you might not be of much help either since the faculty at the school is likely not in your field and the chances of you getting hired at that particular school are one in a million. This is made even worse at less prestigious schools where the faculty are less likely to be “rockstars” in the field and your networking will get you even less. So, the argument goes, it seems like we might be doing something wrong in asking other students to submit to our graduate conference while we ourselves wouldn’t submit to others.

I accept that 1) It is beneficial for graduate students from less prestigious departments benefit from hosting a graduate conference and that 2) I, generally, do not benefit from attending graduate conferences, especially at less prestigious departments.

Nonetheless, I think there is no reason that they shouldn’t continue to exist because it seemingly must benefit graduate students who submit papers to them or else they wouldn’t do so. That is to say that graduate conferences are clearly pareto improving, else they would not happen.

These students must benefit from submitting their papers these graduate conferences, or else they would not do so. And there may be a number of reasons for their doing! First, they may think that conventional advice is bad advice. Maybe they have some reason for thinking that graduate conferences are uniquely beneficial in ways that other conferences are not.³ Or, there might be a specific reason for wanting to attend this conference. The only time I ever submitted a paper to a graduate conference was because I was particularly interested in the keynote speaker and the conference was close to home. Or, students might just prefer to pay for a low-stakes place to test out new ideas. I know of at least one graduate student with hefty funding who has seemingly decided to go this route.

Regardless of what their reason is for submitting their paper to graduate conferences, it seems that they benefit from doing so or else they would not do it. And, clearly, students who host conferences also benefit by doing it. Thus, we should feel no shame in our hosting these conferences since we are both made better off by their existing and without this option, both sides would be worse off. It’s a clear pareto-improvement and we should be happy that these conferences exist!

1. My few conversations with other suggest that this is the greatest benefit that departments get from hosting a conference. ↩︎
2. You might reply that it is still nice to get feedback on your work from others since it is sometimes difficult to see even the most obvious objections to your view if you don’t talk to anyone about it. But in that case you can talk to graduate students in your own department for the same effect. ↩︎
3. I’ll be the first to admit that I am skeptical of almost any advice I receive concerning best practices for graduate students. I receive contradictory advice regularly. Maybe these people have no idea what they’re talking about. ↩︎