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The must-attend conference for Health Economics PhD students!
Elena Arroyo-Borrell
PhD student at the University of Girona
Research Group on Statistics, Econometrics and Health (GRECS), University of Girona, Spain
CIBER of Epidemiology and Public Health (CIBERESP), Madrid, Spain
Email: elena.arroyo@udg.edu
On countless occasions I’ve heard that attending a conference provides students with a unique opportunity to meet people, receive feedback on their work and gain insights into a specific field. And while this is undoubtedly true, to be perfectly frank these goals are not always easily achievable for many students because there is neither the time for comments during the presentation nor the chance to approach a particular expert personally. However, I’ve found a conference that really does provide the opportunity to rub shoulders with the experts, ask them questions and get their feedback: the EuHEA PhD student-supervisor and early career researcher conference.
First up, just look at how the presentation time is structured: 30 minutes of presentation + 10 minutes of comments by a senior researcher + 10 minutes of opening discussion. This structure provides us with a great opportunity to present our research and receive top quality comments and feedback from fellow students and senior researchers. This allows us to to improve our papers remarkably, but also to learn from our own and other students’ presentations. From personal experience, I can assure you that this is the best way to receive constructive and valuable feedback and that’s why this conference is so worthwhile to attend. Future attendees: I know presenting and discussing your papers can seem time-consuming and daunting even, I thought the same, but believe me, it’s absolutely worth it!
Second fact: you will be surrounded by fellow students, the genuine protagonists of the conference. It’s all about you! You get to meet other PhD students, share your experiences with them, and even make new researcher friends. Although this is an international congress, unlike many others, here meeting people is really easy, and what’s more, experts and senior researchers are exceptionally friendly and totally approachable!
Third plus: Great presentations! The topics of the presentations are so interesting that sometimes I find it difficult to choose which presentation to attend. The presentations are really professional, even though for some of the students this may well be the first conference they have ever attended.
Last but not least, outstanding organization coupled with the perfect location! The Universitat International de Catalunya (UIC) was the perfect setting for the conference and the meals, times, schedule, accommodation etc., were brilliant. A really great initiative was to disseminate all participants’ emails for future contact, which facilitates networking and keeping in touch!
To finish up, I would like to take advantage of my experience to make a suggestion: I think it would be really forward-thinking to introduce a training course or seminar for PhD students that we could all benefit from during the meeting. In my opinion, not only would it be of great value, but it would also help to improve our knowledge in Health Economics.
On that note, I’m really looking forward to another enjoyable conference next year!! This is truly a great conference environment for PhD students!
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