by Franziska Boenisch and Adam Dziedzic

After having started as a Ph.D., you naturally get to interact with some researchers: your advisor, your lab mates, other students in your institution. However, the community is larger than that. We share a few tips with you on how you can get engaged with larger parts of your community.

The first place to get engaged is by visiting conferences. Therefore, it will, of course, be crucial to identify what conferences “your community” submits to. You can either do this by asking your advisor, more senior Ph.D. students, or postdocs, or by just looking at the papers that seem most relevant to your current project and understanding where these have been published. If your institution does not have the funding to send you to a conference when you don’t have an accepted paper, look out for sponsoring and scholarships. Many conferences actually have programs that provide financial support for students. Once you made it to a conference, talk to many people, go to poster sessions to identify people whose work is most related to yours, and even attend the social events.

In addition to meeting people at conferences, nowadays there are also a lot of distinguished lecture series, or talks online. You can learn about them through dedicated slack channels, on twitter, newsletters, or google groups. Attend the talks that seem relevant to you or the talks given by the researchers whose work you are excited about. Most of these talks cover the person’s (recent) work, so in the best case, you read their papers before attending the talk. This will also give you a good possibility to ask insightful questions and to get noticed by the speakers or other attendees.

Finally, there are also more active ways of getting involved. For example, you can volunteer as a reviewer for conferences from your field. Thereby, you get to interact with your fellow researchers directly and get access to the latest research in your field. You can also help organize events, like conference workshops, or mentoring sessions at your institute, a conference, or during a summer school. Usually, it is helpful to voice your interest in getting active in the community towards your advisor and other more senior researchers in your field because they are likely able to connect you to the right people to get active.