The Student Affairs Committee of the International Communication Association has renewed itself and is ready to work hard toward making ICA an intellectual home for emerging scholars.
This year, the Student Affairs Committee is composed of five people and is quite diverse. The committee leaders are the two elected student representatives to ICA's Board of Directors: Malte Hinrichsen, who is a Ph.D. student in communication research at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and Diana Nastasia, who has recently finalized her Ph.D. in communication and public discourse at the University of North Dakota in the U.S. The committee also includes Nicolas Bencherki, a Ph.D. candidate in communication at the University of Montreal in Canada; Anastasia Grynko, a Ph.D. candidate in journalism at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in the Ukraine and a public relations practitioner in her country; and Joice Soares Tolentino, an M.A. Student in global media studies at Karlstad University in Sweden and a former public relations officer for nonprofit organizations in Brazil.
To identify a set of priorities for ICA's Student Affairs Committee, a set of items for this committee to work on in the near future, we have exchanged several e-mails among ourselves and with previous members. In order to avoid reinventing the wheel, we have asked former elected ICA student representatives to detail their successes and roadblocks, and to discuss the things they would have liked to do and did not get to, during their service on the Student Affairs Committee.
Rebecca Hains, 2006-2008 ICA Student Representative (currently assistant professor at Salem State University), stated that being a good student representative "wasn't so much about big accomplishments or milestones as being responsible and focused in the many functions of the position - always prioritizing students' interests."
Tema Milstein, 2004-2006 Student Representative (currently assistant professor at the University of New Mexico), wrote extensively about both successes and things remaining to be done. She commented: "I feel the greatest successes included getting the student reception really going. When we started, it was a rather bland get-together in a hotel room over a few dozen overpriced appetizers. My student board comembers and I transformed the reception into a true party, where people got to really get to know each other by dancing, reveling, and experiencing the host country/city together. In NYC, we first moved the reception from the conference hotel to a dance club. In Dresden, we worked with local grad students to find a great club and local DJs. I hope this tradition carries on. It was not only fun, but it provided a space in which people felt more free and made long-lasting international connections and memories.
"We also took part in creating and running an orientation for first-time ICA attendees (student and faculty)," she added, "And creating a student lounge space at the conference that had ICA-experienced grad students assigned to the lounge at all times to help orient and introduce new students to others. I think both these efforts helped people feel more at home at the conference and my advice would be to continue with the lounge and publicize it well before and during the conference."
Tema also shared her thoughts about what could still be done in the future: "Three things we weren't able to do, but that I hope can still be done, are:
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"secure money to fund more graduate students to attend ICA;
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"create a more open-access resource for job postings - a job listserv supported by ICA that freely reaches ICA members and nonmembers would not only be an important international resource for students (and faculty looking for positions) but would attract more people to ICA as an organization; and
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"poll grad students who are not ICA members to find out why they aren't. For instance, I'm at a department with a strong emphasis in intercultural communication and many international students, but very few people attend ICA. I think there are at least two issues at play on this last issue that is true for grad students from many different universities: a lack of funding to attend more than one conference a year, and a perceived or real lack of space for many of the topics and approaches grad students are focused on in their work (e.g., performance, environmental, cultural, critical, etc.). I think a poll of reasons grad students have for not attending would be enlightening for the ICA leadership and would help ICA envision future directions."
With these ideas in mind, we are making our own list of tasks for the Student Affairs Committee. In the next issue of the ICA newsletter, we will share this list of tasks with you, and will invite your feedback. Stay tuned!
