This year’s Graduate Research Symposium takes place Thursday, April 24 at Northside Hall on the IU South Bend campus. Running from 5:30-8:30 p.m., the event is free and open to the public.
The program starts at the Louise E. Addicott and Yatish J. Joshi Performance Hall, with graduate students from the master’s of music program giving live performances. Associate Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs Hope Smith Davis will give the welcoming remarks, and professor of film studies Elaine Roth will provide a brief keynote address.
The hallways, lobbies, and classrooms of Northside are the venues for the remainder of the event. More than a dozen graduate programs are represented, across several disciplines, presenting original research and creative work.
“As our graduate programs have grown, there’s been increased networking among the programs,” says Jennifer Essig, Speech Language Pathology program director and clinical associate professor. “They’ve really banded together, and almost every program will be represented this year.”
Poster presentations will be set up in the hallways and lobbies. Their respective student researchers will be on hand to discuss their work and answer questions. Dedicated classrooms will host a series of panel discussions.
“Panel discussions are helpful for research projects that are more descriptive in nature and might not lend themselves well to the poster format,” Essig says.
Most of the discussions take the form of a graduate student giving a summary presentation of the project, followed by a Q & A section.
This annual event has been gaining traction in recent years.
“It certainly has grown,” says Sharon Pape, clinical associate professor and program director of the Master of Science in Occupational Therapy. “There were more submissions this year than ever before. This event not only brings attention to the graduate-level work that the current students are doing, it also raises awareness of the variety of graduate programs that we offer.”
