Most of us have a story about a first date that seemed to go well, yet the person never called us back. It's often a guessing game trying to figure out what you did wrong. Did you talk too much? Get food stuck in your teeth? Have bad breath? It's an uncomfortable experience—and it isn't isolated to romantic relationships. Every researcher has met a potential collaborator or client at a conference, presented them with a business card… and never heard from them again. If your networking connections are ghosting you, it's easy to get stuck wondering what's wrong.

When you are working as an academic, attending conferences is an important part of your job. Attending a conference allows you to present your work to the academic community, to hear about the latest research by others in your field, and to network with fellow researchers to help expand your knowledge and promote your career.

Your research is finished, and you can't wait to present your latest discovery at an upcoming conference. Unfortunately, organizing your findings has been a nightmare. It's tough deciding how to best present a project to people who know little about it—especially when you know every single angle. 

Ahh, conferences. They can be deeply informative and a lot of fun – but they can be a headache too! One point of pain in attending conferences is the application stage, where you send off an abstract of your work together with information about yourself and hope to be allotted a poster presentation or a coveted talk. If you're applying for conferences and finding this to be a stressful experience, don't worry, you're not alone! Here are five of the biggest struggles that academics face when applying for conferences.

Conference Monkey is proud to introduce the winner of the ESD Conference Invitation. Conference Monkey invited one lucky participant to our partner conference, Economics and Social Development Conference, which took place in Prague. Meet Elmira Mirguseinova from Lithuania. 1. Could you introduce your academic background?