I’m a PhD student in engineering, and use Julia extensively (and almost exclusively) for my PhD work, since my advisors don’t much care what language or tool I am using for my modeling work. I’ve been doing this for almost 4 years.
I would love to attend JuliaCon this year (and thought about attending previous years)–I’ve submitted an abstract. When I put the idea to my advisors, though, they weren’t too keen–essentially they feel like there’s not a lot of benefit to my projects scientifically, particularly compared to attending a conferences in my field.
The amount of time I have spent developing skills in Julia feels significant, and I see it continuing to be part of my future academic career. Making meaningful connections with other people using Julia feels important to me, especially since so much gets done by collaboration in the open source world.
That being the case, does anyone have any advice about how I can pitch JuliaCon to my PhD advisors?
I don’t know about your specific situation, but PhD students often need to give up opportunities to attend conferences in their own fields because of funding constraints, so I wouldn’t push your advisor on this if I were you, I’m afraid to say. If you get a confirmed slot for a talk, or even a keynote, that could certainly help.
Random idea: Maybe if you became a Julia teacher in your group/department, JuliaCons could become one of your ways to stay updated on Julia to teach better.
Another possibility : there are funds for people that cannot afford to come on their own, handled by the Julia community itself. Maybe you fulfill the application requirements, in which case the remainder to pay by your advisors would be greatly reduced. Look for the Julia diversity and inclusion funds ? Or ask on slack’s Juliacon channel maybe
Maybe you can consider what you would get out of JuliaCon that benefits your PhD. You say you use Julia almost exclusively for your PhD. If you can convince your supervisors (and yourself!) that the input from other JuliaCon attendees to your presented work (may it be in code collaborators, new users of your software through increased visibility, or just getting suggestions on what you could do better in your modeling - “use PackageXXX.JL to do this part 10x faster”), I do not see any reason why you should not attend the conference. You can also attend the conference only partly, if a whole week is too much to ask. Getting travel grant money would probably help a lot your argument also.
Having said this, I have never attended JuliaCon in person and I also used Julia exclusively in my PhD and subsequent postdocs within geophysics.
Do you know of others in your field of research attending JuliaCon? Or of authors of packages you are using frequently? If yes, then you maybe have an angle to argue that networking with them advances your project.
This is one reason it was awesome when JuliaCon was online during the pandemic and I was a grad student on another continent. I didn’t have to ask my professor for funding, I just signed up and presented.
I hope there can be another online JuliaCon one day. It would make it much easier for me to participate as someone who works in industry.
It is not clear if “piching” is about funding or something else (eg leave if you are teaching, etc).
Generally I would agree with your advisors — programming languages are tools, not the objective. It is easy to lose sight of this if you spend a lot of time programming, which is normal these days in science, but nevertheless it is good to keep this in mind.
While meeting people in person is always nice, most people collaborate just fine without it. Submitting PRs to open source repos is a good way to initiate a collaboration.
Hm, if “pitching” here refers to convincing your supervisors to give you the money to attend JuliaCon, that might be difficult.
Even if supervisors do recognise that the programming part is important (I am hopefully one of them), there is still quite a step from “using Julia and its ecosystem” to “using it to an extend that it is a major part of your PhD”. That would for me be a distinction.
Conferences are for exchange of knowledge, and that should focus on bringing the theory and results of your thesis further.
Whether that does include code development, I can not say from what you wrote, but I can understand your supervisors.
With that in mind, the already given advices to apply for own grants is what I would recommend as well.
Thanks all for the thoughtful responses–I appreciate the advice!
As surmised, for me this is mostly a funding question (or at least I assume so, since I don’t have any teaching duties). It’s a fair point that although work in Julia makes up a large part of my day-to-day, most of my code is field-specific applications of the Julia ecosystem, rather than major contributions back, so it would be hard to justify attendance as having benefits for my research projects. But I think I still see value in attending, given my interests and aspirations, so I’ll probably keep trying to find an avenue.
I guess attending this year will be mostly a question of whether or not I am able to find external funding that matches my situation well enough (or can make it happen out of pocket).
Here’s hoping I might be there to see some of you in Pittsburgh!
We’re just a week or two late here, but for the future the best way would be to submit a talk yourself! Especially if you can find a field-relevant mini-symposium — that’d be the perfect combo. Not only would you be presenting, but you’d be able to bill it as a place to also work within your field (in addition to it also being a tool).
I did submit an abstract to the most relevant minisymposium, but just two weeks before JuliaCon there is a conference much more specific to my field where I also submitted an abstract (and my funding is in question even for that one). But a good point nonetheless, and worth highlighting for the silent spectators in a situation like mine!