CHI 97 Electronic Publications: Special Interest Groups (SIGs)
Students at CHI
Michael Byrne
Psychology Department
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890 USA
+1 412-268-3498
byrne+@andrew.cmu.edu
Stacie Hibino
EECS Department
Software
Systems Research Laboratory
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 15213-3890 USA
+1 313-936-0393
hibino@eecs.umich.edu
Keywords
CHI students, graduate students, thesis issues.
© 1997 Copyright on this material is held by the authors.
Introduction
The Students at CHI SIG
provides an open session where all students attending CHI'97 can meet and
discuss graduate student issues. The SIG is intended for 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 these programs.
Structure Of The Session
The SIG will begin 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.
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 the two or three
important issues that each student had to consider, and finally any words of
wisdom they may have for HCI graduate students. The presentations will be
geared toward students who may not have an advanced knowledge of the speaker's
specific discipline.
The speakers will be borrowed from the CHI'97 doctoral
consortium. The doctoral consortium
chair is being a great help to us by recommending three speakers from among the
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 kept small to encourage discussion.
The groups will be
free to discuss any relevant area of interest and we will provide a list of
questions and topics that may help get the discussions started. These include:
- What makes a good proposal or thesis?
- What makes a good advisor?
- How does one pick a thesis committee?
- Is it possible to have outside interests as a graduate student?
- What research are you doing or interested in doing?
- Is CHI by definition an interdisciplinary field, or should there be
a department of CHI at universities?
- How do you define a good thesis topic?
- How can one get more involved in the CHI community?
- Beyond student life: research in the CHI community.
- Sharing your work outside your university: publishing papers and
making outside contacts.
What To Expect From The Sig
We believe that discussion topics related to student issues would be
inherently valuable--especially with the participation of students from
different schools. Undergraduates and junior graduate students would also have
the opportunity to get an idea of the scope and content of a good thesis. The
SIG will also hopefully encourage students to get more involved in the CHI
community after the conference has ended, perhaps through the students.chi
mailing list or via WWW resources. Another valuable outcome is that
participants would find some familiar faces at this and future CHI conferences,
having met one another at this SIG. To that end we have requested a meeting
time on the first or second day of the conference, preferably right before
lunch so that we could encourage participants to join each other for lunch that day.
CHI 97 Electronic Publications: Special Interest Groups (SIGs)
