The Demography Student Summer Methodology Workshop has been an annual event since 1994,  initiated when Dennis Hogan was PRI Director. The organizing committee membership is the result of "bottoms-up" request to all Demography Program students to help organize the event. By now there is a notebook that is passed down to successive cohorts of volunteers about how to organize the event, subcommittees needed, topics covered in the past, etc. The Chair of the 2008 committee is Matt Hall. Over the years some PRI Directors have met with the students a couple times to facilitate the planning process. Other PRI Directors have wanted the Statistical Core Director to provide leadership (which did not happen when we were out-sourcing statistical consulting to the Stat Department), or sometimes I have been asked to meet with the students to get things going. Carolyn Scott assists the students in conference organizational planning and budget issues. The students really learn a lot about conference planning from this process.
  
For 2008, the carry-over student committee members  (4th year or below) got going early in the Fall. George Farkas and Gordon DeJong met with them once or twice about organization and potential topics,  and Dr. DeJong attended another meeting where workshop topics was the specific agenda item. The students identifies a range of potential topics of major interest to this cohort, given courses offered here, topics not in the curriculum, newly emergent methodological issues, etc. Their decision to poll all Demography Students about topic preferences among the top 4-5 ideas they identified was their own wish for broader input.

In sum, the Demography Student Summer Methodology Workshop has become institutionalized in structure and process and is strictly a volunteer effort.

Previous Summer Workshops