Registration at: https://barcamps.eu/phd-day-konvens-2021/

Organizers: Esther Seyffarth (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf), Oliver Deck (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Janis Pagel (Universität Stuttgart), Ronja Laarmann-Quante (Universität Duisburg-Essen), Stefan Grünewald (Bosch/Universität Stuttgart)

This year’s KONVENS will include a full-day satellite event dedicated to PhD students and other junior members of the NLP and CL community. The PhD day will take place on September 3, 2021, from 9:00 to 17:00 (CET) in a purely virtual format (details TBA). There is no participation fee for this event.

The goal of the KONVENS PhD day is to bring together junior members of the NLP and CL community in a professional, but accessible setting. Particularly first-time conference attendees are highly encouraged to register for this satellite event.

The PhD day will take the shape of an unconference. This is an interactive format in which the participants develop the plan for the day together at the beginning. Anybody can offer to host a session on a topic of their choice, and participants vote to select which sessions are included in the plan for the day.

To give us more time for scheduling on the day of the event, you are encouraged to describe your session ideas in the participation registration form already. This will allow you to prepare your topic, and will improve the voting process for deciding which sessions we will be offering. Please feel free to prepare a talk, a panel discussion, or some other type of session in advance!

Of course, if you have spontaneous session ideas on the morning of the event, you will still have an opportunity to propose those sessions.

The topics for the sessions can be chosen freely, but they should be loosely related to Natural Language Processing and/or Computational Linguistics, or with organizational aspects of being a PhD student. For instance, sessions like the following could be offered:

• Internships and industry jobs
• The “Computational Linguist toolkit” – Setting up your perfect work environment and selecting an operating system, text editor, reference management tool, go-to scripting language, favorite keyboard, …
• Acquiring new technical skills outside of classroom settings: Best practices, pitfalls, and tips
• If you want, you can propose a session in which you give a past or upcoming conference presentation of your own work
• How to write a good NLP paper
• How to make the most out of attending (virtual) conferences
• …

The focus of this event format is on interactive sessions. You can propose a session without being an expert in the topic – if you volunteer as moderator, you might be able to learn a lot from the discussions during the session. All session hosts will receive a certificate after the event certifying their contribution to the event.

PhD day participants are expected to follow the KONVENS Code of Conduct.

Preliminary schedule (multiple sessions may be held in parallel):

09:00 – 10:00	Welcome and creating the session plan
10:15 – 11:00	First session
11:15 – 12:00	Second session
12:00 – 13:30	Lunch
13:30 – 14:15	Third session
14:30 – 15:15	Fourth session
15:30 – 16:15	Fifth session
16:15 – 17:00	Wrap-up