The NISS Graduate Student Network was initially established during Summer of 2020 with the goal of bringing together students from different institutions. Currently, David Kent (Cornell University), Hannah Waddel (Emory University), Rebecca Kurtz-Garcia (UCRiverside), and Xinjun Wang (University of Pittsburgh) are the graduate students in the network’s executive committee working with the members of the steering committee, Drs. Esra Kurum (UC-Riverside), Kevin Lee (Western Michigan University), Piaomu Liu (Bentley University), and Sumanta Basu (Cornell University). The mission of the network is to organize events so that students can meet and share their experiences with students from other NISS affiliate institutions through social events, the discussion board, alumni meetings, workshops, and more!
Through many different activities students can share their experiences regarding their graduate program, they can discuss how to be an effective TA, how to handle stress, how to work effectively with your advisor, students with internship experience can share information regarding their training and there could be many more topics students can discuss and learn from each other! The network has a discussion board where students can ask questions and share their experiences.
The network organizes a social hour every other month for students to get together and discuss various topics. In addition, the network has also organized two alumni events, where recent alumni share their experiences regarding their graduate programs, current jobs, job search, and interview, and they answer questions from graduate students. You can access information regarding these events through our event page.
Upcoming Events
There are two upcoming events. The first event will focus on what to do once you get job offers from academic institutions, how to decide between them, and also how to negotiate on an offer; the second event will be a statistical software event, in which we will talk about useful software tools for graduate students. More information on these events will be available on our website. In addition, we will be organizing a virtual research conference for graduate students in June, stay tuned, more details on this will also be shared on our website.
Join Today!
We encourage all graduate students from NISS affiliate institutions to join us! There are plenty of opportunities to participate, help organize, or even lead activities in our network. We are hoping to increase our numbers and we believe this network could also lead to a bigger network and be beneficial throughout the student’s career even after they graduate from their programs.