From the archive: Surviving conference coffee

Six tips for getting the most out of conferences

Most of us are put off by the thought of entering a professional environment and engaging with total strangers or, worse, people we haven’t previously met but know who they are and who might have a bearing on our future career. Most of us are equally ill at ease asking questions of experts in a field when we are not totally sure we are on solid ground with those questions. And most of us do not appreciate compulsory consumption of thin, bitter coffee.

And yet many of us keep turning up at conferences where all of these situations are likely to occur. So, how to handle them? Phil Ward tackled this perennial question in this article, published in June 2017.