Benefits of attending science conferences

Howdy y'all!
Sorry I haven't posted in the last few days, the new semester just started up. Yay! Got to get everything situated. Time for me to start applying for more internships and travel grants to attend conferences all over the world. I'm a broke college student, but I love what I do. So far, I have had the opportunity to present my research at the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) and Society of Wetland Scientist (SWS) conferences. Opportunities like these are extremely beneficial as a young aspiring scientist! They allow you to network with other scientists in similar fields that you may have the opportunity to work for or collaborate with in the future. These conferences allow me to improve my abilities to effectively communicate science. Not only to scientist in my field, but to all different people with a variety of educational backgrounds. If anyone knows me, public speaking is NOT my forte. So this is actually one of the hardest things for me to do. Getting up and trying to not only explicate your study, but kind of sort of sell it. You want to convince, highly intelligent individuals why your work is important, why the world should give a damn. Nobody cares about rotifers, (haha) but when given the opportunity I'll show you otherwise. These conferences also allow you to attend work shops to prep you for grad school, future work environments, improve your "elevator talk" or teach you ways to connect with people you don't know to well but are interested in their work. Imagine how hard it is to approach someone who you only know through amazing papers they've published. If you've got any tips on public speaking, communicating science, or any of the such I'd love to hear about your approaches. There's a lot of different things to learn at these conferences, keeping you up to date with research equipment, new software and technology. Anyways, I've met some great senior scientists along the way as well as other students like me. I hope to be given more opportunities such as these past few.
SWS Conference was held in Puerto Rico
Beautiful island. Beautiful souls.

ASLO was in Honolulu, but I ended up later exploring 3 additional islands. I believe this was Maui