Academia and conferences

1. Questions at talks are partly performance; the real conversation is at the coffee break. A hostile question from a PhD student is a career risk nobody warns you about.

2. One paragraph, one specific ask. Six hundred words to someone whose work I'd read closely got nothing; three lines to someone more senior got a same-day reply.

3. Who you're seen talking to at your first conference shapes how you're read for years. The people to whom that's obvious don't experience it as information.