Several new activities designed specifically for ICA student members are being developed for the association's 2011 conference. Two of the most exciting of these are a political communication preconference with submissions exclusively from graduate students, and an inceptive series of master classes that will bring together graduate students with established scholars.

We have asked Yariv Tsfati (U of Haifa), who has been on the planning team for the political communication preconference, and Larry Gross (U of Southern California), who is planning the Master Classes, to answer a few questions about the new developments for ICA student members.

When asked how the idea for the preconference came about, Tsfati responded: "Mentoring of graduate students is one of our division's aims, but this goal is very hard to achieve at the main conference, where our space and time are extremely limited, and dozens of political communication papers are presented daily. The Department of Communication at my university has been successfully organizing an annual conference for Israeli graduate students over the past seven years, and I was thinking that that this format would be suitable for an ICA preconference."

When asked who spearheaded the idea, Tsfati cited a truly international team of scholars, including himself; Kevin Barnhurst (U of Illinois at Chicago); Claes de Vreese (U of Amsterdam); Patricia Moy (U of Washington); and James Shanahan (Boston U).

Asked what the group was hoping to accomplish through this preconference for students, Tsfati named as its goals "providing guidance, feedback, and professional socialization to political communication graduate students at the master's and doctoral levels, introducing graduate students to ICA, inviting them to take part in the academic discourse on political communication through ICA, and cultivating a network among young political communication scholars. Merely putting a select group of political communication graduate student in one room will provide them with the opportunity to develop meaningful professional relations. Adding to that the possibility to present their research and receive feedback from faculty mentors should make this event significant for the graduate students.

"As a division, we want to provide more graduate students with the opportunity to get to the main ICA conference. Hopefully, the students attending the preconference will stay for the main conference, get to know ICA, and come back to ICA in the future."

Larry Gross commented on the new master classes for students. "The idea for the master classes came from discussions with students at the Singapore conference," he said, "where it was noted that many senior scholars do not typically speak at ICA, and it would be good to have a format that allowed students and junior scholars to meet and hear from some of the well-known scholars whose work they have read.

"We are scheduling six Master Class sessions with senior scholars at the Boston conference, in an early evening time slot (6-7:30 pm) that will not conflict with the regular panel sessions," Gross added. "We have not given the presenters any instructions or restrictions on how they conduct these master classes - after all, it would be inappropriate to instruct master teachers on how to do their business. The master class speakers who have agreed to participate, so far, are: Max McCombs, Elihu Katz, Annie Lang, John Hartley, and Patti Valkenburg. We hope to have an additional speaker signed up soon."

Note once again that these conference events are specifically designed for students-in an academic orientation, as opposed to the more traditional social activities for students at the ICA conference, and attuned to the needs that students have articulated in building their scholarly careers. We urge you to participate in these events and to provide feedback that will ensure they continue and develop in beneficial directions for the future.