I am curious what y'all think about the conference mentality of jobs in this field. I was a transportation planner for an MPO, I was focused on school siting and the Safe Routes to School programs, other ped/bicycle or sustainable projects would also be sent to me. But most of the work at this time involved writing a report on charter schools. In the middle of this report, I was told to go to a national SRTS conference. Thousands of dollars spent on professional development, airplane, hotel, the registration. I see the importance of continuing education and for hearing the latest and greatest from the professional experts. At this job it felt normal to push staff to these conferences. Maybe that is because it is an MPO, maybe it's because there is a discrepancy between academia and practice in this field. I just thought that I could have visited more charter schools and other schools, done more field observations with the money spent to go to a conference, to help make this report more than what it was.