Greetings NASSS graduate student members!
We hope that you have all had fun and productive summers, and that your preparations for returning to school (or whatever is on your agenda for September) are going well. For those of you have not met us yet, we are your NASSS graduate student representatives; Michele Donnelly (McMaster University) and Jennifer Sterling (University of Maryland). As graduate student representatives, it is our responsibility to keep you informed of all that is happening with NASSS (especially those issues that concern graduate students), and to represent graduate student concerns to the executive board (as voting members). Please feel free to contact us any time if you have questions or suggestions; we can now be reached at our new "official" e-mail address: grads[at]nasss.org.
As the new school year starts, it is an ideal time to begin (if you haven't already) planning for this year's NASSS conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. If you have submitted an abstract and been accepted, you will have heard from the session organizer by now. And in the next little while, you will be able to access the preliminary conference program online. If you have not yet heard from anybody about your abstract submission, please contact this year's Program Chair Nancy Spencer (nspencr[at]bgnet.bgsu.edu). If you are presenting a paper, you must be registered as a NASSS member, and to take advantage of the early conference registration discount ($5), you need to register by 15 September. Please consider the journal option (a good way to increase your sociology of sport library) and be sure that you are getting listserv messages. All registration information is available through the NASSS website.
Below, we have included information about:
This year's graduate student workshop - "Negotiating Academic Relationships" deals with various issues related to the relationships that graduate students can and should develop in order to assist them in their time as graduate students, and to prepare them for careers after the completion of their degree(s).
This year's workshop is organized slightly different from the previous two: following an introduction to the workshop topic, NASSS member panelists, Dr. Susan Birrell (University of Iowa), Dr. Michael Messner (University of Southern California), Dr. Brian Wilson (University of British Columbia), and Dr. Joy Griffin (University of New Mexico) will facilitate small group discussions. These will be driven by questions and comments from the participants in the session. In order to help the panelists prepare, we are asking you, as NASSS graduate student members, to submit questions in advance of the Vancouver conference. Please contact us (your graduate student representatives) at grads[at]nasss.org with any questions related to this year's workshop topic that you would like us to pass along to the panelists. In order to give the panelists adequate time to prepare, please send your questions by 1 October.
If you have not already booked a hotel room at the conference hotel, and you would like to stay at the conference hotel (something we recommend for all graduate students), you have a couple of options: 1) contact other graduate students to find out if they have space in their rooms (this can be done through the bulletin/message board on the NASSS website); 2) contact Dean Purdy (deanapurdy[at]yahoo.com) to let him know that you are still interested in booking a room (the initial NASSS block of rooms is full, but Dean is negotiating with the hotel for additional rooms). All of the information about the conference hotel is available on the NASSS website. Staying at the conference hotel is a good way to ensure that you can take advantage of all of the events, academic and social, offered during the annual conference. Sharing a room with other graduate students (rooms generally fit four graduate students very comfortably) will help to defray accommodation costs (rooms at the conference hotel are $149 or $179 CDN a night).
If you decide not to stay at the conference hotel, alternative accommodations close to the hotel (5 -12 blocks) include: Days Inn Downtown, (http://www.daysinnvancouver.com); The Listel, (http://www.listel-vancouver.com); and hostels American Backpacker's Hostel (see http://www.hostels.com), Cambie Hostels (Seymour and Gastown, http://www.cambiehostels.com).
When making your accommodation and transportation arrangements, please keep in mind that there is an opening reception on Wednesday evening (1 November), and that many conference participants choose to stay through Saturday night (4 November) in order to have one last night of socializing before the conference ends.
All graduate students should try to book their flights as soon as possible in order to take advantage of seat sales, and to make sure you have the most flexibility in choosing your times (and, hopefully, as few stopovers as possible). For graduate students traveling from the United States, it might be cheaper to fly into Seattle and take a shuttle to Vancouver. QuickShuttle (http://www.quickcoach.com) will deliver you, roundtrip, from SeaTac Airport to the hotel doorstep in approximately 4 hours for $77 US dollars (according to research as of the end of August). Also for American graduate students, carrying your passport when traveling will likely make your trip as smooth as possible.
You should also check with your department, graduate school, graduate student association, etc. for information about procuring conference travel funding.
This year's Take a Student to Lunch event will take place on Friday, 3 November. Take a student to lunch is an annual event and involves faculty members taking graduate students out for lunch (and picking up the tab). We will soon be sending an e-mail to NASSS faculty members asking them to volunteer for this year's lunch, and we would like you to start thinking about who you would like to have lunch with. We will do our best to match you with somebody who shares your (general) interests, but even when this is not possible, you have the opportunity to meet somebody new, and to have a free lunch! Closer to the conference, we will start asking for your faculty requests.
We hope that your fall semester starts well, and we look forward to seeing you all in Vancouver in November! Please contact us with your questions for the graduate student workshop and with any other questions or comments you might have about this year's conference or about NASSS more generally.
Best,
Michele Donnelly (2004-2006)
Jennifer Sterling (2005-2007)
(grads[at]nasss.org)
We have selected the topic, “Tips for Conferences” for the inaugural posts on the grad page. Our aim is to include information that is useful for all graduate students attending the annual meeting (Vancouver, British Collumbia, Canada in 2006), but particularly for those graduate students attending their first NASSS conference. These are our ideas and ‘tips’ (generated with the assistance of former graduate student representatives), and we encourage you to contribute your own ideas, either through the bulletin board on this site, or by e-mailing us. We would love to learn from your conference experiences!
Graduate Student Minority Scholarship Award
In recognition of the recommendation made by the Racial Diversity Committee in the fall of 2003, the NASSS Conference Programme Committee is piloting the proposed scholarship program for a graduate student who is a member of a racial or ethnic “minority” group. The purpose of the scholarship is to create a mechanism to identify racial and/or ethnic “minority” graduate students who are doing research in the area of sport sociology and to provide a means of supporting their work and association with NASSS. The award is for $500 to be applied toward expenses associated with attendance at the NASSS 2006 Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, CANADA.
Applicants must be members of NASSS. The application process for the scholarship is as follows:
Application Deadline: 15 July 2006 via e-mail.
Submit materials to:
Louis Harrison
Chair, NASSS Racial and Ethnic Diversity & Climate Committee
lharri[at]lsu.edu
Barbara Brown Student Paper Award
The DEADLINE for submissions is September 1, 2006.
Network with other graduate students at a Friday morning breakfast, courtesy of NASSS. Location TBA. New Grad Reps will be elected at this meeting.
A key event in the NASSS conference schedule for grad students is “take a student to lunch’. This event will take place at lunchtime on Friday, 3 November and is a great opportunity to meet with a specific professor (and a free lunch only adds to the experience). Also, look for the sign up list by registration when you arrive in Vancouver!
