Thursday, May 12, 2005

Graduate Student Research Writing Conference

The last few weeks of the quarter students will be presenting on the topics of their long papers at the Graduate Student Research Writing Conference. This is a simulated academic conference held in the classroom to give students an opportunity to discuss their research and practice presenting. A conference program lists the presenters and their topics along with an abstract of their presentations. Student volunteers are asked to facilitate the sessions. Everyone in the audience is asked to fill out evaluation sheets for each presenter.

The idea for this came from my experience teaching in China. One of my colleagues, Professor Zhu, organized a mock international conference every year for the doctoral students we taught. It was a great opportunity to give them a chance to practice presenting on their research. Professor Zhu invited guests, students' academic advisors, committee members, to attend, which made it more real for the students. A lot of the students in 802 have not attended a conference in their field or presented at one, so I thought a mock conference would be a good experience for them, to practice presenting and assist in writing the long paper.

No comments: