CS Colloquia: Student Guidelines

Colloquia provides a venue in which you become familiar with CS research, an important opportunity that allows you to make a more informed decision about whether or not to go to grad school. Another goal of colloquia -- although to a lesser extent, since clinic also serves this purpose -- is to provide you with insight into non-academic, professional opportunities that are available in CS. This latter goal is met by occasionally inviting speakers from startups, industry, etc. The purpose of this document is to outline what is required to pass colloquia in a given semester.

Attendance

Generally speaking, colloquia are bi-monthly affairs; you are no longer required to attend a lecture every week. While attempts will be made to hold colloquia on a regular schedule -- i.e., every other week -- there will undoubtedly be occasions where attendance is required several weeks in a row. It is your responsibility to make sure that you attend talks on those Thursdays in which they are happening. The course's schedule is available to you in two flavors:

The CS Colloquia Home page, which will be kept up to date.
The day before a given talk, an abstract will be sent out to the course mailing list.

This semester, there are seven colloquia in total; in order to pass, you must attend all of them.

Suppose you have a valid excuse for not attending a colloquia, i.e.,

a medical issue comes up;
you have a senior-related conflict (e.g. job or graduate school interview);
you have a conflicting school-related activity (e.g. a swim meet).

You can obtain up to one excused absence by sending email in advance of the meeting that you are going to miss. In terms of grading, this excused absence will be treated as if you were there.

Summary Sheets

Your attendance is recorded every time you fill out a colloquia summary sheet. It is your responsibility to make sure that you put your name on this sheet and turn it in. These forms are looked at, providing feedback that helps us to plan future colloquia around your interests. Although constructive criticism is an appropriate item to include, forms should be filled out respectfully. Doodling should be omitted.

To ensure that there are no errors in our recording process, you will receive an email anytime you were not recorded as having attended and an excused absence was not obtained in advance. It is your responsibility to reply to this message as soon as possible if it was generated in error.

Dinner

We will now be hosting after-colloquia dinners at the Garret House. Before dinner begins, various snacks will be served, giving you a chance to mingle with the speaker beforehand. Dinner will likely end by 8PM. As dinners are reserved in advance, you must sign-up beforehand if you plan to attend. All colloquium students are required to attend at least one dinner per academic year (i.e. one dinner over the fall and spring semesters combined). Dinner sign-up is handled on a first-come first-serve basis using this TWiki.

Petitioning the Faculty

If for any reason you do not meet the 7 colloquia attendance requirement, i.e.

you forgot to turn in a summary sheet;
you forgot to obtain an excused absence in advance;
you have a special circumstance that requires missing more than one lecture;

your only recourse is to petition the CS faculty, who will then decide whether or not to give you a pass for the semester.

It is your responsibility to petition the faculty by sending email, including several detailed paragraphs describing your special circumstances. In some cases, the faculty might make passing contingent on some makeup work. It is then your responsibility to follow through with this work and inform the faculty of its completion by sending email before colloquia grades are assigned for the semester.

Last modified: Thu Sep 11 18:37:28 PDT 2003