Research, teaching, and service: the miniconference as a model for CS graduate seminar courses

Rarely are the three pillars of academia---research, teaching, and service---addressed together, within one intellectually cohesive context in the graduate curriculum. Such a context is important for exposing students to the inter-relationships among these facets.This paper presents our experience with structuring graduate research seminar courses around the model of a "miniconference". Throughout the quarter, students pursue original research projects in the discipline of the seminar course. At the end of the quarter, students write their findings as technical conference papers, then act as the miniconference program committee in reviewing each other's submissions. Finally, the selected papers are presented at the miniconference. In addition to the model itself, we describe some variations in instantiation and an assessment of the benefits of this general approach.

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