Hacking Grad School

For this session I want to discuss to two main points: how to hack grad school to make it easier through tech, and how to deal with the anti-tech institution.

The first is how we grad students can use technology to make our lives easier such as using an SVN to help with writing a dissertation or TRAC to keep tabs on collaborative projects. Technology is also going to be important in networking, so a discussion of the best networking tools and how to use social media appropriately as a grad student can also be a topic.

Second, as an up and coming generation of more tech savvy students, we need to know how to interact with less than tech literat,e and even anti-tech, faculty. How do we convince committees that tech-based dissertation topics in the humanities are valid? Can we convince them? Is it better to hide our inner geek until we become professors? Should we digivangelize? I’d like to discuss possible strategies for digitally inclined grads in a discipline that believes itself to be analog.