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Doctoral Colloquium

Every year ASIS&T invites doctoral students to participate in the Doctoral Colloquium, which will take place as part of the Annual Meeting of the Association of Information Science and Technology . This half-day event is intended for doctoral students in the later stages of dissertation research, including, students who are post-proposal, who have a completed research design, begun data collection and analysis, or who have defended their dissertations before the conference. Pre-proposal students will also be considered. The conference registration fee will be waived for students accepted for the Doctoral Colloquium.

The goals of the ASIS&T Doctoral Colloquium are to provide doctoral students with a supportive and critical learning opportunity to discuss their work, highlight theoretical and methodological problems/issues for further discussion and inquiry with senior mentors and Colloquium participants. The organizers invite a group of prominent professors and experts to serve as mentors during the Doctoral Colloquium. Participants will have the opportunity to receive feedback and comments about their work, in one-on-one sessions with mentors. There is an open discussion session where students can ask the mentors questions about the job search, managing an academic career, developing and maintaining a research agenda, and other topics of interest. Another goal of the Colloquium is to develop a supportive community within which students can begin to develop a professional network, interacting with peers and senior scholars in information science and related disciplines.

How to Apply
The call for submissions for the Doctoral Colloquium is distributed in January each year. Students must submit a nomination letter from their advisors or chairs and a five-page essay (in English, including references) describing their PhD research proposal or dissertation project electronically via the conference submission system. The submission should have the nominating letter followed by the essay.

All application essays submitted to the Doctoral Colloquium will undergo a thorough reviewing process with a view to providing detailed and constructive feedback. The Doctoral Colloquium program committee will select the best 20 submissions for participation. The student winners of the ASIS&T proposal and dissertation of the year awards will be invited to the Colloquium without a submission.

Applicants should address each of the following questions:

  1. Problem statement: What is the problem that you are addressing?
  2. Relevance: Why the problem is important?
  3. Related work: How have others attempted to address this problem?
  4. Research question(s): What are the research questions that you plan to address?
  5. Approach: How are you planning to address your research questions?
  6. Evaluation plan: How will you measure your success - faster/more accurate/less failures/etc.?
  7. Preliminary results: Do you have any preliminary results that demonstrate that your approach is promising?
  8. Implications: What are the theoretical, methodological and practical contributions of your work?

Additionally, all submissions must be single-author. The application essay will not be published. Students accepted to attend the Doctoral Colloquium must plan to attend the full Doctoral Colloquium and the Student Awards session in order to gain as much value as possible from the experience.