Call for Student Volunteers

We are seeking student volunteers for the 41st Annual ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2018). The SIGIR 2018 conference will be held on July 8-12th, in Ann Arbor, MI, USA.

We are recruiting student volunteers during the conference. Volunteers who are not already recipients of a SIGIR Student Travel Award will receive a registration waiver (or reimbursement if they have already registered) that includes admission to the main conference, a tutorial, a workshop, and the conference banquet.

There are two ways you can become a volunteer. (1) If you are not a recipient of the SIGIR Student Travel Award this year, you may be eligible for the Sponsored Travel Grant and can apply for a volunteer position that way: we highly encourage you to send in your application as soon as possible here. (2) If you are a recipient of the SIGIR Student Travel Award or you don’t need additional travel support (e.g., local applicants), you can submit your application to volunteer via email, following the guidelines below.

Student volunteers will be expected to assist staff with tasks such as organizing conference materials, staffing the registration desk, assembling conference packets, assisting session chairs with running technical sessions, checking badges, helping people get where they need to be, running errands, and the like. These tasks will typically consist of multiple one to four (1-4) hour time periods, for a total of up to 8 hours, including the days for tutorials and workshops, allowing the student to spend the rest of the time attending the conference. Volunteers are also required to attend an initial planning meeting before the start of the conference on Saturday, July 7th.

There are a limited number of these positions. Applicants will be notified if they are selected by June 15 at the latest. Applicants must be enrolled as a student at the time of the conference. Undergraduate students are welcome to apply. Students interested in volunteering should send the following information in an email message to the SIGIR 2018 volunteer chair (email: sigir2018-volunteers@umich.edu):

• Name
• Email address
• Mobile phone number
• Please indicate days and times when you are unable to work as a volunteer
• University/college where you are a student
• Advisor‘s name (or the name of someone who can confirm you are a student)
• Advisor‘s email address
• Advisor‘s phone number
• If you have a paper, poster, demonstration, or doctoral consortium presentation in the conference, indicate which and the title.
• If you have strong preferences for the type of volunteering, please indicate that. For example, if the thought of actually interacting with conference attendees makes you nervous, that would be useful to know.

If you have any travel constraints that impact your availability, please let us know. Volunteer positions will run from Sunday, July 8 through Thursday, July 12.

Applications must be received by June 8th, 2018 for full consideration. After that date, they will be considered only if there is unfilled need.  Contact email: sigir2018-volunteers@umich.edu