Is there a minimum number of members required in the committee?
You definitely need more than one or two people on the committee or the work load will be overwhelming and the symposium may never be finished. We are working with five, but four or six would work just as well. So while there is not a default minimum number of committee members, I would strongly suggest that there is at least four people on the committee.
There are a few people in our group who are not yet ACS members, should they join the ACS now, or is it okay to wait to join to see if our group is chosen to build the symposium?
Those in our group that were not already ACS members waited until the symposium was within the year (ACS membership is yearly from the time of joining) so that they only had to pay for one year's membership.
How is the symposium funded?
Each GSSPC is responsible for finding the money to hold the symposium. This can be from corporate and/or private sponsors. There are many other options including federal grants that should be considered as you plan for funding the symposium.
Do you invite speakers for the symposium ?
Yes, the committee is solely responsible for the speakers. You may choose to have only invited speakers, or only contributed talks, or a combination of both. This is up to you.
Do you give the choice of topics to speak or do they just speak about the research in their own group?
As in all ACS symposium, the organizers with present a common theme (i.e. Ions in Biological Systems, a PHYS symposium held at the Washington DC meeting). You will then invite speakers who you feel are leaders in this field to talk about what they are doing. You do not tell them what to talk about. However, with contributed talks, you will be able to reject talks that do not fit with the topic of the symposium. Also, as organizer, you will be responsible for arranging the order of talks and making sure that there is a good distribution of talks (i.e. no back to back or overlapping talks).
Can the speakers be graduate students on the verge of finishing their PhD, or should they be full time faculty members?
Again, you make the decisions for your symposium. If you would like to invite graduate students, please invite graduate students. I would like to stress that these GSSPC symposia should be on par or better than the symposia organized by "grown-up academics," and that you should go after the very best people in the US or abroad to talk at the symposium. This is student organized, but geared toward professionals in the field.
Are there any awards for the best presentation for the symposium ?
This will be a symposium at an ACS National Meeting, awards are not typically given. If you have never been to an ACS National Meeting, check out the variety of topics/divisions that were covered at the Atlanta meeting http://oasys.acs.org.
Please tell me more
about your committee of graduate students at UIUC that are organizing
this event. How did this come about? Do you have a campus group that
organizes local programs and you're going national - or did you get
together just to organize the event for the national meeting? Are you
getting support from your faculty? Is there anything else we can do to
help?
Dr. Carolyn Ribes
The Dow Chemical Company
We are a mixture of graduate students at the University of Illinois, although, I must admit that we are all Physical Chemistry students. It was not planed that the committee be made up entirely of PChem students, but that is how it worked out. There are five of us in the GSSSPC; four women and one man, three of us are married, and each of us is at a different stage in the PhD program. The members are Tim (married), Marja (married), Sandra, Courtney, and Dotti (married).
Cathy Middlecamp, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and Program Chair for the Division of Chemical Education, motovated a group of Wisconsin graduate students into putting together a symposium for the 2004 Philadelphia meeting. While on sabbatical at the University of Illinois, she proposed that a group of graduate students from Illlinois organize a symposium for the 2006 Atlanta meeting.
Since January we have formulated the main topic for the symposium and delineated several sub-topics. We then put togeter a preliminary flyer, invited speakers, and are still in the process of soliciting for funding. This has very much been a "learn as you go" experience, as none of the members of the committee have ever been involved in this sort of project. (Personally, fixing our YAG is easier!)
While we do not have a faculty member advising us on what to do or how to do it, we do have the full support of our professors, the department secretaries, and the College of Chemical Science. We are very fortunate in that the faculty is willing to do anything to help; all we have to do is ask.