Well, I just came back from my first presentation in an international conference (well, my first presentation in any conference!!)!
I am very excited!!!!!! It was fantastic!!! My presentation was fine, people found it very interesting and it raised quite a few questions.
But, the best outcome was the connections! I met wonderful people from all over the world, top scientists in various fields. I even found a PhD opportunity in the US (but I have already started mine in the UK), a research assistantship, several proposals for co-authorship and (something that was quite funny but made my boyfriend really mad) a MAN (a professor from Taiwan told me that he liked me a lot and thought that I could be the perfect woman for his son. He even proposed to cover my travel expenses so that I could go to Taiwan and meet his son!!!! Of course I refused!).
Just to cut a long story short, this conference gave a huge boost to my confidence, as I thought that I (being just a student) didn't know a lot of things and wasn't able to start a decent conversation with academics. I proved myself wrong