Conferences in Population Research

Attend! Present! Network!

Academic conferences provide an important training opportunity for graduate students. Regardless of what career path you are on, attending and presenting at academic conferences will help you to expand your professional skillset. Conference-related skills are professional tools that will be transferable to many different career trajectories, in academia or beyond.

CPD trainees frequently present their work at major academic conferences. See recent conference posters of CPD trainees here.

Benefits

• Networking: meet your student peers as well as key figures in your field of interest. Conferences will help you to better understand academic and research cultures as well as to learn about current and future prospects for internships, training, research and employment. The relationships you develop, especially with your student cohort, will form the foundation of your professional network throughout your career.
• Presenting: fine-tune your public speaking and presentation skills. Learn to present data and results to different audiences and through various media types.
• Latest research and trends: conferences provide a quick way to get up to speed on new theory, methods, results and data.
• Critical feedback: the questions, comments and targeted feedback you receive from your presentation (paper or poster) will help you to further develop and refine your ideas. This process can lead to a peer-reviewed publication.  

Plan ahead

While conferences afford many benefits, they demand long-term planning. Most require submissions 6-9 months before the conference itself. To prepare yourself to have presentable results and to find suitable funding, start thinking about conference attendance a year in advance. Discuss options with your supervisor, committee members and fellow students.

Conference funding

CPD student trainees and members are encouraged to seek travel funds from a variety of travel fund sources, including the QICSS students research outcomes grant, the McGill Faculty of Arts internal travel competition and the EBOH internal travel fund competition. Once you have exhausted those sources, you can apply for a CPD student travel award here.

Key conferences in population studies