Selecting Colloquium Speakers
Note: Everything on this page is out of date, because the selection process
keeps changing.
This document is intended to provide a suggestion as to how divisions can go
about selecting colloquium speakers. The method described below has worked
very well in the past.
1. Set up a meeting for all the people in your area (include grad
students, faculty, and post-docs in that area); be sure to tell
everyone ahead of time to have people in mind whom they want to
nominate as speakers
2. At the meeting, explain the system of selecting speakers
3. Write all nominations on the board
4. Begin to eliminate potential nominees until left with 8-10 speakers
(let the people in the audience determine who should be eliminated
right away--could be a variety of reasons, such as the speaker is known
to be a bad speaker, hasn't done interesting research lately, etc.)
5. Discuss the merits and specific research interests of the remaining
8-10 speakers (at least the person who nominated the speaker should
defend their nominee)
6. Vote (can be done any number of ways: I suggest having each person
verbally vote for their top two picks, mark the votes on the board, and
then simply count up the votes)
7. After determining the top three vote-getters (be sure to rank-order
them for me!), make sure you get volunteers from the faculty to host
each speaker (you can also get 1 or 2 alternate speakers)
8. You will also need to select one "general interest" speaker. This will
probably have to be done as a separate voting process. (All areas will
be selecting one general interest speaker, and then the whole
department will vote for which two of the four speakers will get
invited.) These general interest speakers can be former grad students
or people who cross over different research areas.
9. After the meeting, find out the addresses, email addresses, and phone
numbers of all of your selected speakers (plus alternates), and then
give this information to me! Also, write up a little blurb on your
general interest speaker for me (their affiliation and research
interests).