A Doctoral Symposium: Preparing Students for Conference Behavior

Abstract

Doctoral education has not received much coverage at ABSEL. There are a large number of experiential processes that take place during a doctoral student’s career. For many, they learn to teach for the first time, frequently using a modeling process to structure their first courses and then truly using a trial-and-error approach in terms of finding what seems to work. They also learn the research process, again frequently by modeling the experienced researchers to whom they are assigned or with whom they choose to work. For most, the dissertation is the first extensive research study which they conduct and, despite the well-intentioned and nearly omniscient supervision of the dissertation committee, this process invariably involves much trial and error. This paper will look at