BRC Innovation Symposium
A forum to connect the researchers of the BRC to each other, the Med Center, Rice main campus, alumni, and the general public.
The Rice BioScience Research Collaborative (BRC) is a hub of remarkable science and innovation. Yet, the building’s inhabitants often don’t know their neighbor’s projects and their potential impacts. We aim to improve not only the communication and collaboration within the BRC, but also with Rice’s main campus, the Texas Medical Center, and the general public. To improve our communication with these audiences, we will host a forum highlighting the innovation occurring in the building but with each talk geared to a general audience, with the talks approved for posting on YouTube. The subsequent poster session will provide a way for individuals to dig deeper into the research, connecting new students with current students and recruiting faculty members, as well as BRC researches with their counterparts. The event will finish with a talk about current innovative projects from a selected alumnus from one of the departments housed in the BRC, followed by an alumni panel and networking breakout. Finally, graduate student awards and grants will be given. Participating students will improve their communication skills, particularly as they pertain to the public, of which there are fewer forums for development than research talks. This event provides a much-demanded space for communication of research among BRC residents and the public, particularly graduate alumni.
See videos of the Ideas That Go Viral talks from the 2015 Symposium here!
Read the full proposal here.
CEVE A.C.E
Advancing Careers in Engineering
CEVE A.C.E is a multi-faceted project that aims to create intradepartmental and external networking and professional development opportunities for graduate students in the Civil and Environmental Engineering department. This project will be comprised of a series of events aimed at providing the CEVE graduate student body with tools to assist in early career planning and achieving scholarly success.
Read the full proposal here.
Grad Students’ Shark Tank
Learning the art of paper writing and presentation crafting through collective feedback from one’s peers and from experts.
Formatting a presentation or structuring a scientific article is, to a large extent, an art. As such it is best learnt as an apprenticeship: one has to watch others, then to try and finally to receive feedback on one’s work by more experienced practitioners of the art.
A more modern model for the present project, is the so-called “shark tank”: a student gives a presentation to, or shares the draft of a paper with a group of students and post-docs, supervised by a faculty member. The audience provides feedback on the formal aspects such as the quality and visibility of figures, the logical structure of the presentation or the paper, etc. The audience points out weaknesses and faults, and allows the presenter to correct them and to improve their skills.
The program is meant to help graduate students learn how to be as effective as possible in a short oral presentation, or a poster, as well as in composing scientific articles. As, such, this kind of training will not only be beneficial for the presenters, but also for all the participants.
Read the full proposal here.
15th Annual Vagantes Conference on Medieval Studies
Vagantes is the largest graduate student conference for medieval studies in North America.
Vagantes is an annual, traveling conference for graduate students studying any aspect of the Middle Ages. The conference was conceived with several goals in mind, including fostering a sense of community among medievalists at the early stages of their careers, providing exposure to an interdisciplinary forum, and showcasing the resources of the host institutions, all within a student budget.
Want to learn more about the Vagantes Conference? Visit http://vagantesconference.org/.
Read the Rice News story about the Vagantes Conference.