(I wish to remain anonymous, so I've omitted many details here. If those details make this question unanswerable, please don't hesitate to vote it down or close it.)
I've been a PhD student in mathematics for about two years. Whenever I am at a conference, summer school, or a small seminar talk in our university, I usually don't understand anything about the talk after the first two minutes. Sometimes the speaker goes quickly through some basic concepts about group theory, finite fields, or similar, that I'm able to follow because I know the stuff already. But when the new stuff starts, most of the time I get so lost that I can't even answer the simple question "What was the talk about?" when my friends ask. So I just sit there with an open notebook, and after the first few minutes of each talk, I start scribbling some unrelated things to kill time before the next talk. If I see an interesting formula or similar on the slides, even if I don't know what the speaker is talking about, I sometimes try to see if I can figure out what that formula means, just because simple mathematics is still fun - what I do still does not help me understand the topic of the talk.
The problem might be partly about being able to focus, but I guess it's mostly about the actual scientific content. When taking courses as an undergrad, I never had problems of this magnitude while attending lectures because I had time and material for studying the topic before and after the lectures, and the lecturers had a decent estimate of what the students know before the lecture.
Do you have similar experience? Is there something I can do to actually benefit from listening to conference presentations? I hope this is not the impostor syndrome - if everyone in the audience feels like this, conferences are horrible waste of money, time, and natural resources.
I came up with a few ideas but they don't seem practical.
"You're not really supposed to understand anything as a PhD student. Just sit there and wait for a familiar term, theorem, concept, whatever to appear. Conference by conference, talk by talk, you'll probably encounter more and familiar stuff, and before you know it, you don't have this problem any more." If I had to decide, I'd never fund a learning process this slow. Or probably it is much quicker than I can imagine.
"Go to conferences with topics closer to your research." Well, they don't exist, unless I organize a conference about my research. And the point of going to conferences is to learn about things in your field that are not exactly your research (of course in addition to telling others about your research).
"When the conference schedule is published, pick one interesting presentation title for each day and try to learn something about that topic before conference." It might take a few days of focused study for each talk, so some weeks before the conference. I guess that time would be better used doing research.
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