During the summer of 2015, seven USC Annenberg doctoral students were granted Summer Institute Fellowships, which enabled them to attend doctoral programs around the world and expand on the work they're doing here at USC Annenberg. Here is a little about their experiences, in their own words:
Kristen Guth (Fourth Year)
Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme
My experience at the Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme was an intense two weeks of learning about topics and methods central to Internet research. Through faculty lectures, method instruction, and peer presentations, I was able to find space to talk with faculty and peers across disciplines about our current doctoral work and ideas, as well as productive conversation about collaborative projects for extending our work in the future.
Nahoi Koo (ABD)
Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme
During the program, I attended seminars on methodologies and ethics for doctoral dissertation research, which I found a helpful guide for my own dissertation project. I also presented my dissertation ideas, based on what I wrote for my prospectus, and received feedback from other participants. The program was a great opportunity for me to revise my dissertation prospectus and develop more focused ideas/plans for my dissertation project.
Rogelio Lopez (Second Year)
Summer Institute of Civic Studies at Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship & Public Service, Tufts University
The Civic Studies Institute was one of the most intellectually rewarding experiences of my entire academic career—largely due to the wide range of experience and expertise among participants not only by academic discipline, but across entire domains and from countries around the globe. Academics, researchers, community scholars, state officials, educators, technologies, journalists, and activists all came together to discuss and collaborate, with the intent of bridging Civic Studies theories with real-world practice and application.
Nathalie Marechal (Third Year)
Annenberg-Oxford Media Policy Institute
Attending the Ann-Ox Media Policy Institute was a terrific crash course in international and comparative media policy, covering both traditional print and broadcast media as well as Internet governance. The lecturers were a veritable Who’s Who of the field, and the participants were just as impressive. As a PhD student, you don’t often have the chance to learn from and with policy practitioners from all over the world, as well as academics. And of course the setting in Oxford is idyllic.
Mina Park (ABD)
Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme
The OII summer doctoral program is known for an interdisciplinary approach to Internet research. The lectures they offered ranged over a number of topics on Internet research (e.g. online games, political participation, ethics, etc.) with different approaches (psychology, education, political communication, etc.). Doctoral students who attended the program were also from various backgrounds, and this facilitated discussions.
Yu Xu (Second Year)
The R Statistical Computing Environment, University of Michigan-Peking University Joint Institute
I enjoyed this program. It provided great opportunities for me to learn how to use R [an open source statistics program] to conduct advanced statistical analyses (i.e., survival analysis, mixed-effect models) and do computer programming.
Larry Zhiming Xu (Second Year)
CASOS Summer Institute (Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems) at Carnegie Mellon University
The focus was on social and organizational network analysis, complex adaptive systems, designing and evaluating computational models, virtual experiments, and docking. The sessions were split into lectures and labs, which I found very useful because the participants were given time to work with the professors and TAs to analyze our own datasets.