I was very disappointed with the conference. I had hopes that there would be lots of opportunity to meet staff from potential positions and I had heard rumor that some people even started the interview process at the conference. Not the case! There were two sessions set aside in the afternoons to meet recruiters from agencies that had decided to come, and almost no medical staff had come from any agency, so there was very little detail available about what the work might be like. There was nothing like an interview, and the days were so scheduled that there wouldn't have been time for an interview even if the right people had been there. The only potential job lead I got was for an IHS position at an area where I didn't realize they offered any mental health services. The lecture about contracts was too short to be really helpful. I was in the Peace Corps and this conference reminded me a lot of the orientation we had before we left the country- a few days of lectures and forced participation in "games" about the evil, evil things that will happen to you if you don't follow every rule to a T. Not fun, not that informative, parts of it painful.
My placement person isn't very helpful either- his job is to make sure that I follow all the rules to the letter and nothing else- and meeting him in person wasn't worth flying cross-country for. In his favor, he hasn't been replaced this year (yet), and I spent lots of time on the phone trying to figure out who was my contact-person-of-the-hour while I was a medical student and resident.
Bottom line- if you can find an excuse to miss this, do so, and do whatever on-line "education" they want you to do instead. Unless you're really excited about going to Tampa in August. Oh, and they checked attendance at everything and if you don't show to every session (starting at 4:30 or 5 AM by your time if you came from the pacific zone) you won't be reimbursed (weeks later) for your expenses.
On the bright side, it is possible to get new sites approved in a less than absurd amount of time- one agency applied in October and offered me a NHSC-legal job in December.