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Conferences are recognised to be vital spaces for the development of doctoral students, providing access to networks and knowledge, as well as socialising researchers into academia. Conferences provide a fertile ground for analysing what is both considered essential to the academic profession and yet portrayed as luxurious and extraneous. The benefits of attending conferences are intangible, though for doctoral researchers there are more obvious pressures pertaining to employability and knowledge gain. At the same time, it is recognised that attending conferences for any academic with caring responsibilities is challenging, but also that there are particular challenges for doctoral students with caring responsibilities. This chapter therefore focuses specifically on the tension between the heightened importance of conferences for doctoral students and the heightened challenges of care which accompany the financial constraints and precarity often associated with doctoral study. Drawing on the ‘In Two Places at Once’ project, this chapter is based on the analysis of five participants who were doctoral students. The analysis focuses on aspects of negotiating conference attendance and care which are highlighted in participants’ accounts as specific to or exacerbated by being a doctoral student.