International Collaborative Research Forum

On Friday, I was able to attend a conference on campus and I am very glad I did! It isn't very often that I walk out of a conference thinking that all of it was useful for me but I definitely had that feeling after this one. It was called International Collaborative Research Forum and was held the renovated and fabulous and majestic looking Northrop Auditorium. After the opening session, there were parallel sessions for everything and I attended the ones on grant writing, ethics in international collaboration and internationalization in graduate education. I enjoyed all of these, especially the last one, where in addition to the Dean of Graduate Education at U of M, there were people from Council of Graduate Schools and the National Science Foundation.

The grant writing session reminded me of the extensive list of resources the U had online but also (through a question raised by an audience member) that resources are not equitably distributed across campuses and how challenging that can be. A lot of the points made (and overall conference approach) was US citizen specific and in the grant writing process, many emphasized relationships, in addition to the writing convincingly aspect.

The Ethics session reminded me of my work and how much of our focus was on ethics and right behavior. There were sessions on ethical dilemmas, situations where the answers don't seem clear and it was interesting to see that in an academic context. Most of the tangential discussion on ethics I have heard so far has been about 'International students and plagiarism' and I am honestly a little tired of it. It would be nice to have discussions that are a little more broad-based. This session addressed long-term research more than short-term research but was still interesting.

In the last one, the panel was talking about trends in internationalization, how to send students out and to bring the world home to them. I am interested in what is the emphasis on, if any, the international experience of the international graduate student. The discussion also focused on languages and their relevance. All in all, I tremendously enjoyed the session and it was a Friday very well-spent! (Also the food was awesome. Always important for a graduate student. I may have eaten 3-4 brownies, in addition to lunch.)