Research Day @AUC – do we need more such cross-disciplinary campus events?

On March 30th, the American University in Cairo held its first Research Day. The highlights included posters by graduate and undergraduate students (competing for prizes) and 2-minute research pitches by faculty (also competing for awards).

I was involved in multiple ways. I was presenting a couple of posters (faculty also were allowed to present posters but not compete for awards, and so very few ended up presenting posters), presenting a pitch on behalf of a team from my department, and I was a faculty judge of student posters.

I think the key benefit of the Research Day lay in how we had opportunities to listen to ideas and advances in other disciplines. As a faculty judge, I worked with another faculty member (from engineering) to judge posters from two other schools: The School of Business; and Global Affairs and Public Policy school. It was an enriching opportunity to interact with students and learn about their research – and also to learn some new things I would not have naturally sought to learn.

At first I was surprised to be asked to judge posters in disciplines I am unfamiliar with (and grateful I wasn’t judging posters from engineering!) but in hindsight, there was a lot of value in the exposure to different disciplines altogether. Of course I could not judge the quality in the way a professor from the discipline could, but I could judge the value of the research as a layperson (albeit an educated one), and that in itself is valuable – for students to learn to express their work in ways that are comprehensible to a public audience.

The faculty pitches were also valuable – to be able to hear in just two minutes an interesting idea that someone else is working on. This happens occasionally, but we rarely if ever invite a group of faculty from other departments to share their research with us in layperson’s terms.

My understanding is that in future years, the event will be a research week not just one day. This year the tight one-day schedule meant that I did not have time to stand by my own poster because I was busy judging student posters. I would also have been interested in discussing faculty’s research and having students discuss my research with me – the opportunity was not there this year but hopefully it will be there in future years. I am also thinking that post-docs particularly could benefit from opportunities to discuss their PhD and current research, as early career researchers who can benefit from the opportunity to present locally to practice for bigger events internationally.

I know other institutions hold similar events and I am curious how it is organized and how people find it, particularly for institutions that are not R1 (ours is liberal arts and we have several masters programs, several research centers, and one PhD program).

Have you experienced a research day on campus? What was it like? Tell us in the comments.

Photo credits: American University in Cairo view from inside Gate 1 by Maha Bali