I gave a poster session recently out of obligation to some lab funding sources. It was semi-thrown together at the last minute by merging my group meeting slides into a few columns and omitted text because no one reads that anyways. Nevertheless, I ended up getting compliments from one of the professors judging and was told after that I would have gotten one of the monetary awards if not for political reasons (they were awarded to more senior students who didn't have future years of the event ahead of them). A collaborator of a collaborator also stopped and brought with him a manager from Pfizer involved in drugging one of the receptors in the top-right. Heavily censored version: So decent success for an event I wouldn't have attended if I hadn't been obligated to. And helped my confidence to actually talk to fellow researchers instead of holing myself up in the depths of tissue culture.