Graduate Student Networking in Action

I also talked about the Cain Project with graduate students from the two women’s organizations that sponsored the trip: Movement of Underrepresented Sisters in Engineering and Science, and the Society of Women Engineers. One of them was Saumya Sivaram VanderWyst, a Rice BIOE graduate, now working toward a PhD at Michigan. Graduate students at Michigan hope to convince their university to initiate their own version of the Cain Project.

Jan Hewitt, PhD, works mainly with graduate students. She teaches thesis-writing groups each semester.

Graduate students at the University of Michigan recently invited me to give two presentations to science and engineering graduate students. The Michigan graduate students had heard about the Cain Project’s good work from Jason Deibel, a Michigan graduate who is now a post-doc working with Daniel Mittleman from Rice’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Desperate for help with developing speaking and writing skills, several students contacted Debbie Taylor, Michigan’s Assistant Director of Women in Engineering, College of Engineering; tracked me down via the Cain Project website; secured funding; and invited me for a two-day visit.

Some 35 graduate students attended the evening session on “Strategies for Giving Persuasive Oral Presentations.” The next afternoon, 17 students participated in a two-hour workshop about “Writing for Publication.”

In the first session, after a lively discussion about what the students had noticed in good and in poor talks,

I suggested presentation strategies in five areas: audience, content, delivery, visuals, and fielding questions (see box in right-hand column). After the talk, one young man said to me, “You have really helped me. I didn’t have any idea about how to prepare a talk, and now I do. And I have a role model to emulate.”

The interactive workshop about ways to write a publishable paper began with a discussion about what makes a paper publishable—for example, leading- edge research, adaptation for a specific readership and for specific journal requirements, and answers to the Seven Key Questions. We then focused on the seven key content questions, with the students first analyzing a model abstract from a published paper to see how all seven questions can be answered, even in an abstract of only 95 words. (See the Winter 2004 Cain Project Newsletter for a more detailed discussion of the key questions and the model abstract. The newsletter is available online on the Cain Project Website: http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~cainproj). After analyzing the model abstract, the students worked in pairs to answer the seven questions about their own work.

The workshop ended with a guided analysis of portions of the published paper, looking at foregrounding of main ideas, transitions, completeness of explanation, incorporation of related references, use of relevant visuals, and summary of results. The students were enthusiastically grateful for such specific guidelines.