Question for current students: does your school financially support your attendance at conferences?

[ru_geo]

Hi everyone -

Looking for some information about how well different schools support their students' attendance at conferences (national APA, state APA, other local planning-related conferences). Does your school pay your reg fee? All expenses? Expenses up to a certain dollar amount? What's the reimbursement timeline (almost immediately vs well after the conference)?

Feel free to contact me via private message if you're uncomfortable posting publicly in the comments. I'm trying to determine if my school's support, both from the university & the planning school, is paltry or par for the course, and I'd like other schools' policies/procedures to support me (or prove me wrong!)

Thank you

[wahday]

I'm no longer in school, but still on the listserve so I see a lot of info come through. For us, most assistance for attendance at conferences has come through special grants that one must apply to. For example, the local chapter of the USGBC had some money to award to a limited number of people to attend ther Greenbuild conference. Most of what I see is money specified for minority groups to assist with travel or conference fees and these often come through various student organizations. I have never seen our department make funds available directly - they just don't have it.

[Tarf]

I remember having to pay for mine - but we did go as a group, so there were savings on lodging and transportation costs. (Eastern Washington University).

[Blide]

My school's planning department didn't have enough money so people could go to conferences. The school's APA chapter subsidized people going to conferences but it wasn't a whole lot of money. The graduate school had something called professional enrichment grants you could apply for though. Those grants paid all the expenses so a good number of people could go to conferences all over the country. You could only apply for one grant a semester but they did reimburse pretty quickly from what I've heard from classmates.

[Raf]

When I was an undergrad, my school paid for APA conference attendance. That has ended due to budget cut backs. However, check with your state chapter, as mine reimburses students to attend conferences if they volunteer.

[Hink]

Ball State always did a great job of helping fund some of the travel / conference costs. They also pushed many students to volunteer to get the conference for free.

I don't know if they do it anymore, but when I was there is a priority to have a good showing at conferences. And we always did, with one of the largest groups every year.

[AG74683]

Appalachian State provided us with hotel rooms, and transportation to the NC APA conference last fall. We had to pay for the registration fee (although we could volunteer and get that fee waived, which I did), and of course food and such was not provided.

They did not pay to send us to the National APA Conference in Boston though, but some of the planning students chose to go on their own (I think the group was around 8).

[xvodax]

just giving you my experience from my previous program.

Your tuition when paid included membership to CACPT as a student member and travel and conference admission to there conferences.