Mentoring Lunch, for PhD students, Postdocs and junior Faculty

The Mentoring Lunch at the International Semantic Web Conference brings together graduate students and early-career researchers with experienced researchers from both, industry and academia for a lively discussion and question-answering session on a variety of topics. If you are a PhD student, a postdoc, or have just started an independent research career and would like to get advice on any of the round-table topics listed below, please join us at the specially designated tables on October 20th, 2016 (the room will be announced soon). Our mentors are all volunteers from the speakers, chairs, and other senior participants at the conference.

If you would like to get advice from mentors on some of the topics below, please register for lunch and answer a few quick questions that would help us with the organization of the lunch. The first 65 people to sign up will be automatically added to the list of attendees, the rest will be put on the waiting list (we are limited by the room capacity and by the number of mentors).

While we are organizing only the mentoring lunch, we expect that some of you might want to have a more sustained relationship with the mentors and we invite you to ask the mentors at lunch about such a possibility.

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Register for Mentoring Lunch

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Target Groups

Graduate Students

Being a graduate students is oftentimes a confusing tasks. Apart from the local network of such a colleagues and advisors it oftentimes helps to get an outside opinion. The graduate students discussions at the mentoring lunch usually include topics such as:

• Is grad school right for you?
• How to pick the right research area?
• Publishing.
  How important is it for your PhD ? When is your story ready to be published? Which journals and conferences to try? Who should be involved in writing the paper, and who should be coauthors?
• How to handle problems with your advisor or colleagues?
• How important is teaching in a research career?

Postdocs/ Early Career researchers

• After your Ph.D. – what comes next? Choice between postdoc, faculty position, jobs outside academia.
• Publishing.
  How important is it for your career? When is your story ready to be published? Which journals and conferences to try? Who should be involved in writing the paper, and who should be coauthors?
• Proposal writing.
  How central is it to my careers? How do I learn it? How do I distinguish between “good” and “bad” money.

Junior faculty

• Starting your own lab: where and how (tenured/fellowship/Grant) and other issues.
• Preparing for tenure/promotion.
• Raising kids while pursuing an academic career.
• Balancing service, teaching and research
• When to say yes and when to say no to service requests
• Proposal writing. How central is it to my careers? How do I learn it? How do I distinguish between “good” and “bad” money.

If you have questions and suggestions, please feel free to send an email to iswc.mentoring.lunch.7890@gmail.com.

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Preliminary list of mentors

A list with the mentors will appear soon.

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Organizers

Daniel Garijo	Information Sciences Institute
Abraham Bernstein	University of Zurich