Since the original date suggested for the spring conference is fast approaching, we discussed moving the event to the Saturday after the first week of classes in the spring quarter. The overall theme is undecided. For a keynote speaker, Anne has one possibility, Brandon has another, or perhaps we could communicate with BASES for some contacts or suggestions. Some concern was expressed over whether or not PhD students would be willing to participate in a research paper competition, and perhaps a presentation competition for classical research papers might be more well received. For industry judges with experience in scholarly research, Ting may have a good contact at GM, and Ozlem may have a good contact at HP. We will need to develop some categories of judging so the participants know what to focus on in their preparations. For the poster session, it would be helpful to use whatever rules were used at the Miami session. For the case competition, we discussed a management/strategy case, perhaps from a professor here. We could ask a company to sponsor by providing judges and/or a prize, in return for the opportunity to pitch the company to participating students from a number of universities. Participating teams could be made up of undergraduates and co-terms from any school, with possibly a maximum of one masters student. So far, it appears we are still looking at hosting the events in Thornton and Terman. We need to find out what happened with our funding requests and what our budget will be.

Corporate night has been canceled.

Brandon and Ozlem will be meeting soon to discuss how to operate the program and to drum up participation from both undergraduates and graduates. Beyond just matching up mentors and mentorees, Stanford INFORMS could host one event each quarter to bring participants together formally.