Please give me an advice on whether go to a conference or not

[waitforit]

Hi linguists! I need an advice here.

 

I'm now a linguistics MA student in the US (international) and I'm going to apply for PhD this fall. My interest area is Phonology/Phonetics. I was informed this morning that one of my undergraduate papers was accepted by an international conference held in Japan (Though the name is Asian conference xxx) and have a chance to be published if I attend to the conference. The paper is on second language acquisition of semantics/syntax and the conference is on Language learning. Despite the large cost on flight+hotel, my program says they cannot fully fund me but perhaps provide a few hundreds (the registration fee is $500ish). The question is, should I go to this conference and cover most of the fee by myself?  Is it worth going there if the theme of the conference doesn't agree with my current interest area, and my interested PhD program doesn't specialize in SLA at all? Will the experience on such "International conference" and perhaps published paper unrelated to my future specialization help my application for PhD after all? I'm really confused here..(And I don't have any adviser to talk to) Could anyone give me some advice? Thank you so much!!...

[fuzzylogician]

Several questions. First, will you have anything else presented at a conference/published in a proceedings by the time you apply? Second, how prestigious is this conference? Will people in the field recognize it? Third, have you tried contacting the organizers to help you with the funding? you might be able to get some reduced registration fee or a subsidy, or at the very least they might be able to find someone to host you so you don't need to spend money on a hotel.

[waitforit]

Thank you for your reply. You're always so nice!

It's only my second semester in linguistics so I don't know if I will have any good enough paper for conference/publish by the time I apply. But I do have four papers to finish by the end of this semester, and I plan to submit at least two of them to conferences (if there are related conferences).

It is a conference called "the Asian Conference on Language learning" held by International Academic Forum. It's only on its third year and I sincerely don't know its prestige. But since my interested PhD program doesn't have faculty in this area I doubt they know it well. 

The third point sounds good. I never know I can do that.... I'll try and see if it can work out. 

 

Thank you again!!!

[fuzzylogician]

Well in that case, honestly unless you can get serious help with the funding I would probably choose not to attend the conference. Personally I've never heard of this conference, though you should ask faculty in your field who might know better (I'm in a different subfield). For admissions purposes you could have on your CV something saying 'accepted but declined' so you can specify that you were accepted into this conference, but I wouldn't keep such an entry on my CV for any other purpose. Of course, you can also have one of your recommenders mention your acceptance and explain that you declined for funding reasons, instead of having the entry on your CV. Either way, it's not completely useless even if you don't go. Good luck with your other papers!

[waitforit]

Thank you! I've decided not to go. Harder work on current programs!