Students at CHI

Casey Boyd* and Jennifer Kay**

*Institute of Cognitive Science and
Department of Computer Science
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0430 USA
cboyd@cs.colorado.edu, +1 303 492 4800

**School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891 USA
jennie@cs.cmu.edu, +1 412 268 6498

Keywords

CHI students, graduate students, thesis issues.

PURPOSE

The Students at CHI SIG provides an open session where all students attending CHI 96 can meet their peers while discussing graduate student issues. The SIG is intended for the participation of graduate students (beginning through senior), recent graduates, undergraduates, and friends.

MOTIVATION

A CHI conference can be exciting and overwhelming, especially for students. The student volunteer program and the doctoral consortium help students meet each other, but many student attendees do not participate in either of those programs.

STRUCTURE OF THE SESSION

The SIG begins with three graduate students presenting brief talks. Each presentation will last for ten minutes, followed by five minutes of questions. After the student presentations, there will be group discussions of graduate student issues. Each segment will use half of the ninety-minute session.

Student Presentations

The presentations will be exceptionally brief overviews of the students' thesis work (2 or 3 slide summary), followed by somewhat less brief overviews of a couple of important issues that the students had to consider, and any words of wisdom they may have for HCI graduate students. The presentations will be geared towards students who might not have an advanced knowledge of the speaker's field.

The speakers will be borrowed from the CHI 96 doctoral consortium. The doctoral consortium chairs are being a great help to us by recommending three speakers from the doctoral consortium participants, all of whom are doing excellent and interesting thesis work.

Group Discussions

After the presentations, the SIG participants will split up into small groups for discussion. The group size will be small to promote interaction. If attendance at the SIG is small enough, we will not need to split up.

The groups will be free to discuss any relevant area of interest and we will provide a list of questions that might get the discussions off to a good start. Topics will cover graduate student issues and more general subjects:

What makes a good proposal or thesis?
What makes a good advisor?
Is it possible to have outside interests as a graduate student?
What work are you doing or interested in doing?
Is CHI by definition an interdisciplinary field, or should there be a department of CHI at universities?

WHAT TO EXPECT TO GET FROM THE SIG

We believe that discussion topics related to student issues will be inherently valuable--especially with the participation of students from different schools. Another valuable outcome is that participants will find some familiar faces at this and future CHI conferences, having met one another at this SIG. To that end we requested a meeting time on the first or second day of the conference, preferably right before lunch so that participants can join each other for lunch that day.