You can also filter it so that you only get messages sent from your school - so you could use a filter for all emails from *rutgers.edu for example. Of course, if you subscribe to an academic list and someone from the schools sends a message to the list, you'll get a false positive and messages from a prof's personal (gmail/hotmail/yahoo) email account won't get filtered.
I absolutely agree. Maybe its my field though, but I was at a conference in December and some PhD candidates who had won student awards made their presentation in front of the ~1500 people that were there in jeans and t-shirts or hoodies. I was like, Mark Zuckerberg much?
I am too. It really is hard to focus on anything else at this time. I saw someone suggesting a system where they wouldn't check their email until they graded 2 papers. I'm *trying* to do something like that, but it's hard.
I guess it varies by field, but they do tend to schedule them on weekends, you might have to take off a Friday to travel. Hopefully you'll get in and they'll reimburse your travel.