Louisiana Tech University’s College of Engineering and Science (COES) Graduate Student Council (GSC) invites students to participate in its annual research symposium. The symposium, which will be held at noon on Friday, April 14, in the Integrated Engineering and Science Building, is open to all COES graduate students who register by March 31.

Through the symposium, participants can share their research in a professional conference setting through oral, poster, or oral and poster presentations.

For the oral competition, students will have 12 minutes to present their research and another 3 minutes to answer questions. Students in the poster competition can use posters they’ve presented before or create new ones.

Tyler Priddy-Arrington, Biomedical Engineering doctoral student and winner of the 2022 COES Graduate Student Symposium Session 1, says the experience helped him hone his speaking skills.

“I thoroughly enjoyed presenting at last year’s symposium, everyone had a wonderful presentation, and it was really great to see all of the different research being performed here at Louisiana Tech. Every presentation is an opportunity to improve our abilities to effectively share and communicate our research, and I definitely think the experience with the Graduate Student Symposium presentation helped me when I presented my research at the 2022 BMES National Conference (Biomedical Engineering Society).”

Ann Clifton, doctoral degree computational analysis and modeling student, mathematics and statistics lecturer, and runner-up at the 2022 Graduate Student Symposium, says that presenting in that environment is good practice for a graduate student working toward a career that will involve disseminating technical information to the general public.

“Preparing for and participating in the Graduate Student Symposium provided me the opportunity to not only share my research with the larger Louisiana Tech community and practice communicating deep mathematical ideas to a general audience. It was a challenging but rewarding exercise to condense months of research into a short talk that was accessible to researchers outside of my field of expertise. I recommend participating to anyone who would like a supportive environment to practice giving a job or national conference talk; it is an excellent way to gain feedback and confidence.”

Graduate Student Council Vice President Md Shafayet Alam and Public Relations Officer Diego Segura Ibarra say that participating in the symposium last year gave them the confidence to submit their research to more public forums.

“When the Graduate Student Council decided to arrange a graduate symposium last year, I was very excited about it,” Alam said. “I was delighted to be a part of something that would benefit the graduate students at Louisiana Tech University. The award I won last year helped me understand the importance and application of my research and motivated me to attend other conferences. After this symposium, I attended the international Electrochemical Society last October, where I presented my research. If I had not participated in the Graduate Student Symposium, I would not have had the confidence to participate and present at an international conference. Therefore, I would like to say that attending the symposium was one of the major events in my graduate life at Louisiana Tech University.”

“I prepared a lot for that symposium,” Segura Ibarra added. “Participating felt scary and exciting. I knew I would be competing against other Tech graduate students who also have significant and interesting research, so I worked hard to make a presentation that would make me stand out. I felt scared going against other graduate students with impactful research projects in front of a crowd of professionals that would judge my performance. I was afraid of failing in front of all these important people. But, at the same time, I felt excited because I would get to hear these people’s thoughts about my work, which I find extremely useful. I always like participating in these kinds of events because they progressively make me a better speaker. I believe being a good speaker will help me succeed in the future as it will help me better portray my ideas orally.”

The COES Graduate Studies Office will present additional awards to research and teaching assistants at the event.