One thing about conferences that didn’t get explicitly mentioned: at a conference, the graduate students are feeling each other out. Early in your GS career, don’t go to any conferences unless you’re prepared to be prodded: expect that you will be expected to arrive with better than cursory familiarity pertaining to the topics to be presented. Do not, under any circumstances, admit to a lack of familiarity; you should have read and understood the papers to be presented in advance, should be more or less sufficiently competent to present the material the papers contain yourself, and should have prepared a list of questions to ask the presenters, largely pertaining to applications or open questions identified in the paper.

You will be expected to discourse fluently and intelligently about the topics to be presented, and you will be expected to be bored and not learn anything new for the first half of each talk (and failure to express this boredom with preliminaries, in any casual conversation outside the presentations, will be noticed and noted).

Conferences, at the graduate student level, are not where you go to first learn about what’s being presented; it’s an opportunity for those who fluently understand the presenters’ papers to obtain answers to questions. An individual who asks you what talks you plan to attend is interested in what questions you have prepared for those speakers.

It all seems so obvious in retrospect, but I did not know any of this, and it would have saved naive and sensitive little me some significant embarrassment to have been told this in advance.