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Annual PhD Student Workshop

Student and advisor in front of screenEach spring the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology hosts an Annual Statistics PhD Student Workshop. This event includes presentations by all PhD students who have passed the Advanced Examination but have not yet passed their Proposal (Qualifying) Examination. Each student will present on their dissertation topic, providing some background and an update on the progress of their research. For students who have not yet identified a dissertation topic, the presentation may be material covered in a recent reading course (ideally, a potential dissertation topic).

The Workshop is typically scheduled for late May, after the end of the spring semester. Attendance at the Workshop is mandatory for all student presenters, other PhD students, and tenure-track faculty. Other members of the department are also welcome. Presentations should be approximately 30 minutes in length; these are followed by 10-15 minutes of comments and questions from the audience.

The primary purpose of the Workshop is to allow students to obtain feedback on their research ideas from the entire faculty, whose perspectives may be somewhat different from that of the primary research advisor and potentially quite valuable. The Workshop also provides additional experience for each student in preparing and delivering a presentation on a topic of their particular interest; this should be highly useful for developing future presentations for national meetings (e.g., ENAR, JSM) or for the Proposal Examination. Students will receive constructive feedback on their presentation from their research advisor (or, if applicable, the instructor of their reading course). It is also beneficial, of course, for faculty and other students to learn about students’ planned or in-progress research.