>be me
>attend academic conference
>talks given 1-3 times per day, with 20+ options per session
>have to thus pick 1-3 talks per day to listen to, cannot even listen to all of the ones that interest me
>other events are a forum with boomers discussing diversity or some equally cringe shit, networking events, or an exposition hall where a bunch of companies set up booths
>I am a co-author of a paper published for this conference but one of the boomer profs is giving the talk so I am not even needed
>every day I walk 40 min. to the conference, listen to talks for not more than 1 hour total, get a hot dog, walk back to my hotel and around the city, start this gay thread, and read alone as I normally would... at least the uni. is paying for it kek
...am I missing something here, or are conferences all equally retarded? Note that this is not the first one I have attended and they all seem to follow this organization generally. Academia-anons, can you comment on this and/or share some experiences and/or advice as to what I am missing out on? If it helps I just applied for an Applied Math PhD and have a couple of years of electronics engineering experience, for context.

>inb4 networking
Besides my autism I can approach and talk to people if I so desire, but what is the point? If a presentation is interesting I'll go and read more of the presenter's work and then maybe email him. The companies are kinda retarded as well - am I supposed to walk up to BigCorp Inc.'s booth and just start talking? About what? Who cares? If I was a big fan of the company and thinking of working there then maybe, but I am not and having done that in the past I would get a generic marketing-type talk that would go nowhere. Am I just too retarded (i.e. inexperienced and/or autistic) to be able to 'network' properly at these events?

pic unrelated