Tuesday, 3 June 2008

Second opinions in finance at Gerzensee doctoral workshop


By day's end of the opening of the 2008 Gerzensee meeting, the busy meeting schedule saw 6 research presentations from faculty, 18 doctoral presentations, a meeting of the General Assembly and a plenary lecture by Felix Kubler on robust computational experiments in finance.

The focus of the 2 day event is the doctoral workshop. Students are encouraged to present relatively early drafts of their research, rather than work that is nearer to publication. Each early draft paper is distributed to a single student discussant and to a member of faculty that is not directly supervising the research.

Students are very positive about this arrangement. They gain a critical review of their research from a fellow student, and insights from faculty. These second opinions (this is how one student described the process) can bring focus to preliminary results and can identify blind spots in otherwise well made research plans.

I’ll be following up this post with posts about individual attendees at the meeting, including students and professors who presented their work, and from other finance researchers that assembled at Gerzensee during the these intense two days past.

There is a full photo gallery of the event posted here.

Photos courtesy of Adrian Wipf.

1 comment:

Miret said...

Thank you, Tobe, for your posts on the annual Swiss doctoral workshop in finance.

As a second-year SFI PhD student (Swiss Banking Institute, UniZh), it was my first time at Gerzensee and I really enjoyed it. It was a great opportunity for me to present my current research work and I got very useful feedback from both faculty and students.

The best part for me was to get to meet other PhD students doing research in finance at different Swiss universities; the atmosphere was indeed very friendly and relaxed.

Last but not least, the location is so pretty and the food delicious!

Miret