I am still up at PyCon 2015 in Montreal, and most of my lab is here with me.

On Saturday, I told Terry Peppers and some others that PyCon had been one of my (limited) lifelines to (limited) sanity during my early tenure-track years. Whenever I was in danger of buying into too much of the academic bubble, events like PyCon and the various Twitter and blogging interactions I had in the Python world helped remind me how ridiculous some aspects of the academic world are.

On Sunday, a colleague at another university (who had not been to PyCon before, I think) was talking to me and said (paraphrased): "I wish I could afford to bring my graduate students. This conference is way more relevant to what they'll probably be doing down the road than any academic conference."

On Monday, I gave a talk in the Biology program at McGill, where I was invited by the grad student association. I spent a fair amount of time talking with grad students about career options, and when I mentioned that PyCon was just finishing up, a few of them said they wished they'd known about it. I think they'd have had a good time, especially at the job fair.

Moral of the story, for me: keep on bringing my grad students to PyCon.

--titus