Staying in touch with other researchers is important. You need to know about up-coming conferences, seminars, jobs, etc. To this end, it is worth finding a few key email lists to join. A long list of lists in econometrics and statistics is provided by EconometricLinks. Browse through it to find topics of interest. No doubt researchers in other disciplines have their own lists, but I don’t know about them. For those in Australia and New Zealand, there are two local lists that every statistician and econometrician should be …