Originally Posted by
mechteach
Okay, great. I think that you are being quite realistic about all of this, particularly the lack of a serious budget for conference travel. Many of my colleagues (I'm a faculty member, as might be obvious from my user name) in Australia/NZ struggle to have the budget to send even themselves to conferences in North America, Europe, etc., let alone their grad students and post-docs (I know of two top schools there that allocate under AU/NZ$1000/yr for student travel, and that money is competitive). I very much hope that this won't be the case, but you might even need to start tapping into your reserve of points/miles, rather than staying in an accrual phase. Again, I hope you can avoid that!
My plan here is to get funding from the conference's I attend (e.g. ACM) to cover travel along with the various student travel grants put out by tech companies like Microsoft. One conference I went to this year, I received funding which covered registration and got me a travel grant of $800 USD which just about covers my travel expenses for that conference. My concern of using award miles (aside from the lack of PQM accrual) is I suspect it will be difficult to make those award miles stretch particularly given UAs move to dynamic pricing.
Safe Travels,
James