Attending tertiary education conferences provides an ideal opportunity to learn about current research (and share your own), build and develop professional relationships and broaden your working networks.
The 2023 STARS Conference in conjunction with AMHHEC was no exception. Reflecting on the keynotes, concurrent sessions, posters, plenary event and sharing these reflections adds value to the Conference experience.

Sharing these reflections with your own teams and colleagues post-Conference is just as valuable. Since 2021, Ian Lightbody has been hosting a post-STARS event for QUT (now known as ‘Supernova’) as a professional development opportunity so that delegates at STARS from QUT can share their perspectives on the sessions they attended with their teams. Ian recently contributed a blog post to the UniSTARS website about this positive initiative at https://unistars.org/general/stars-supernova/. Encouraged by the popularity of these sessions, Ian is also hosting a similar event called ‘Nova’ to hear from QUT students who attended the Conference.

It was wonderful to see delegates sharing information about particular presentations on Twitter during the Conference (making good use of the #unistars tag). Janine Rix’s excellent article on LinkedIn STARS 2023 conference – key learnings encapsulated her key takeaways from the event. As well Jessica Morr shared her key insights from the Conference as did Nadia McDonagh (both from the University of Sydney), who reminded us of the value of the STARS Conference in the lead up to the release of the Australian Universities Accord interim report.

In our busy working lives, being able to take time to attend these types of conferences is important in our professional development. Keeping engaged in valuable discussions post-Conference and sharing our learnings and event perspectives is just as important.

Nadia McDonagh and Jessica Morr (University of Sydney)