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.