Service as a PhD Student

I was asked to give a guest presentation to a course of new PhD students about what it means to do service as a PhD student in the Spring semester of 2021. Following that I wrote up this blog post for the lab’s website (original post can be found here - https://spice.luddy.indiana.edu/2021/02/26/service/) and thought I would repost my writing here as well. Hopefully the discussion of different types of service and how students can get engaged will be helpful to others.

Service as a PhD Student

Volunteering and service are considered to be a vital part of a faculty member’s responsibility, to such an extent that many professional positions in academia specifically have it listed as a job requirement that faculty budget approximately twenty percent of their time to service.  For PhD students who may be interested in future careers in academia, starting to build a practice of serving now will help demystify an area that is not often discussed as a significant amount of work, so start reading below with the “Service to the Profession” section. To anyone who is not interested in pursuing a career in academia, please keep reading too! While the specifics of the next section might not apply to you, the remainder of the information for “Service to the University” and “Service to Community” can still be helpful as many fields outside academia of late are placing higher values on engagement outside of simply just a classroom.

Service to Profession

Providing service to the profession typically comes in the form of volunteering your time and experience towards a workshop, conference, or journal. Frequently this includes serving as an invited reviewer of peer reviewed submissions for journals, conferences, or workshops.  Helping to plan a conference or workshop as a member of a committee or organizing reviewers is another method of serving the profession. Many conferences run thanks to the help of many volunteers and it is not uncommon for students to volunteer to help with a variety of tasks during the days a conference or workshop meets. Being a student volunteer at a conference or workshop is a great opportunity to meet students, faculty, and researchers outside your own university and learn more about the work that goes on behind the scenes to make a conference happen. The best advice I have for finding opportunities to volunteer as a student for service to profession is to find a conference or workshop that your advisor, faculty, or other students in your department submit to or already have experience serving in the past and apply to be a student volunteer if they have a program. If they do not have a specific student volunteer program, try seeing if you are acquainted with someone on the programming committee and sending them a polite inquiry if they might need a student volunteer to assist.

Service to University

All students have some level of connection to the institution that they are attending for their PhD program. Whether they plan for a future in academia, industry, government, or something outside those sectors, it is still important to have a level of engagement through the university, college, or department wide groups. As a PhD student there are many opportunities to provide service to the university that might not immediately be recognized as service. For example, mentoring an undergraduate student for a Research Experience for Undergraduates is a semester long program that would count as service for a PhD student. Participate in University wide governance bodies, such as the Graduate and Professional Student Government (GPSG) as a departmental representative. Plan a workshop or symposium for other students and faculty to present research and discuss ideas.  Lead a group of students in an event to raise money for a charity that collectively they believe in. There are many topics and methods that students can choose to use to engage with their university, so it is important to find a topic that speaks to them and to which they feel connected.

Service to Community

Service to the community for PhD students offers a wide variety of options for students to engage in their local areas. Serving on a local community committee, organizing student engagement with service activities in the community, and being active in local organizations are all options that meet criteria to report as service to the community. Students may also have the chance to collaborate with local nonprofits, government, or business organizations on potential research projects to help their local community at the same time. Public presentations, attending, and participating in community outreach events are great ways to engage with people who live in the area who may not be students or directly associated with the university.

Of course students are not limited to only reaching out to communities in their local areas. Many PhD students have the opportunity to engage with online communities through social media, blogging, creating videos, podcasting, etc. There are many ways to engage and convey ideas regarding research, work, hobbies, and other things that are of interest to you. 

Things to Consider

While there are many opportunities for PhD students to volunteer and offer service for different groups in many ways, they do have a few things in common. Service does require time and effort on the part of the student and have varying levels of commitment. Service to the Profession requires a lot of searching and networking starting out, but eventually the more you volunteer the more others will seek you out requesting your service. Service to the University often requires longer commitments, such as a whole semester or two semesters, but might only meet infrequently. At the same time service to the university can be very beneficial for networking within the university for students. Service to the Community offers the chance to engage with people outside of the university and academia, but be mindful that people and organizations outside of the university may work on different timetables and have different goals and agendas. It is best to be open and up front when discussing your intentions for volunteering.

CHI 2020 PC Meeting at IU

CHI 2020 Program Committee Meeting
(Photograph credit by Aehong Min.)

This year I got the chance to participate in the CHI 2020 PC Meeting that took place at Indiana University’s Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. In the interest of clarity and to help break up confusion, I feel it is important to give a bit of context as to what a PC meeting is, who is involved, and what it entails. To be perfectly honest I did not previously know anything about the process of choosing papers and creating a program for a conference beyond what I have done as an author submitting papers and someone reviewing other papers.

“PC” refers to the Program Committee and the meeting takes place after papers have been reviewed. There is a lot more that happens before the PC meeting, but I will only speak about the portion of the process that I assisted with as an Assistant to Subcommittee Chairs (aSC). Given that CHI is such a large conference, papers are submitted to subcommittees that have specific topics such as health, visualization, design, and etc. I was selected to assist Dr. Marilyn McGee-Lennon from the University of Strathclyde, and Dr. Maria Wolters from the University of Edinburgh in the Health subcommittee. As an assistant it was my duty to help ensure that the meeting between the two Subcommittee Chairs (SCs) and all of the Associate Chairs (ACs), who helped review and coordinate reviewers for the papers submitted to the subcommittee, had all the information they needed and technology worked as smoothly as possible. This required organizing meetings through conferencing software (Zoom), working with Precision Conference Solutions (PCS), communicating with the SCs and ACs via Slack, and assisting in tracking decisions (Trello).

During the meeting the SCs would put up an order for papers to be discussed and I would display the next paper’s title and any AC or SC who was marked as having a conflict with the paper was removed from the room physically or removed from the call virtually before the ACs who that reviewed the paper were given the opportunity to discuss the paper, the insights from reviewers, and their overall suggestion. Once the ACs who reviewed the paper were finished voicing their information the floor was opened to the remaining ACs to discuss the paper. Once the committee had a decision the SCs recorded the selection and I would adjust the information in Trello to reflect what was the final decision.

After three days with half-day long meetings the subcommittees finished coming to decisions regarding the papers that would be conditionally accepted to CHI 2020. It was a eye opening experience to get to see how the process of creating a program for such a large conference takes place. Just the people who participated across the various virtual meetings and those in the physical meeting place numbered over 500 individuals who worked to help create the program for the conference next spring. That does not even begin to include all the tremendous work from the various reviewers who read and commented on submitted papers nor the authors who worked to submit thousands of papers to CHI 2020!

As I wrap up this post I want to once again thank everyone that was involved in the PC meeting along with all of the other students who acted as assistants to the SCs. Getting the experience to see part of how the conference is made was an eye opening experience and I am grateful that I could be a small part of it.