Completely agree with this approach. Conferences, at least for me, are not that helpful. Grad level advanced courses are usually the best resource because other people have "filtered" interesting content and organized it into some common theme e.g, I recently took Kai Li's course on "Big Data":

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spring13/cos598C...

And discovered interesting papers from conferences that I'd never otherwise look at.