The Graduate Student Council at Louisiana Tech University set a goal to enhance the graduate experience for all graduate students. To achieve this goal, the council needed to understand what graduate students felt would make their experience better. The feedback received was simple, graduate students wanted to have an opportunity to meet other students (which provides an enhanced community feeling and atmosphere) and to know what sort of research is being done by their peers. Instead of a simple mixer, the council decided a college wide conference could fill the void while providing additional benefits to graduate students. The conference allowed all graduate students in the College of Engineering and Science to have an opportunity to showcase their research and build their network of peers. Providing an atmosphere where students can expand their network invites opportunity for collaboration. The conference used the NSF style of review. An intensive peer review provided a mechanism for mirroring professional organization/society paper and proposal process. This paper will chronicle the experience of putting on a conference for graduate students by graduate students. It will discuss the lessons learned by the graduate students who organized the conference for the first time and provide advice to other universities that might want to provide a similar service to their graduate students. Survey data from graduate student experiences with the process as well as the conference will be presented.
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