karen louise smith

Recently, two promising possibilities for summer institutes and doctoral colloquiums came to my attention. For anyone who is not an academic, summer institutes and doctoral colloquiums are like summer camp for PhD students. You send in an application which may include any combination of: reference letters, a paper and a research statement. If selected, you get to spend a few days (or a week) networking with other students and guest faculty. Last year, I attended the Values In Computer and Information System Design (VID) at Santa Clara University. VID was excellent and this year I hope to attend one of the following:

• The iGov Research Institute being held in Seattle, Washington http://www.ctg.albany.edu/institute

• The PhD Colloquium at the eGov Conference in Lintz, Austria http://www.egov-conference.org/egov-2009