Hello all,

I have never submitted an engineering conference paper before and I really wanted to work towards a conference and the deadline for paper submission is Feb next year, I am not sure if I can do enough to submit a paper (as postive and optimistic as I try to be). Even though I have been workign hard at it, I feel like I am behind where I should be (although I am sure this is a natural feeling durind a PhD).

Any words of advice/sharing of experience on this?

I think using conferences as deadlines as such to complete certain parts of your Phd is very useful. My sup is American and his Phd back in the day was "Phd by publication" (which granted is not exactly the same thing as my idea in this post) but I've tried to set up conference opportunities to motivate me to finish chapters of my thesis. For example, the paper I am giving at the conference I am attending on Fri will be a distilled version of my Ch.1. A conference I'm heading to in March will be Ch.2. etc.

It's also pretty useful for getting your ideas out there and testing the water. The fact is nobody really gives a shit about what someone else is doing. We are all self-obsessed phd students after all.