Graduate Teaching Fellow Gulcan Cil is among 16 students nationwide invited to participate.

PhD student Gulcan Cil

The Western Economic Association International (WEAI) Conference (sometimes referred to as “The Westerns”) is a major annual event for many economists. For UO’s Gulcan Cil, it was a special opportunity to hone her presentation skills in preparation for the job market.

UO Economics GTF Gulcan Cil (fourth from left, in blue) is pictured alonside fellow students chosen to participate in the Graduate Student Dissertation Workshop hosted at the WEAI conference in Denver.

Cil was chosen to participate in the Graduate Student Dissertation Workshop—one of only 16 students nationwide invited to attend. “About half the students there were from the East Coast—not just schools in the West,” Cil says. “It was a great opportunity to present my work and get feedback from faculty members and other PhD students who didn’t already know me.”

In addition to having the opportunity to present her work to a small group of PhD candidates and a faculty advisor with similar areas of focus, Cil also was able to participate in mock interviews with a group of volunteer faculty members. “All they knew about me was what was on my CV and what I said in the interviews,” Cil noted. “I was able to find out what they thought of me and learn those things you might not necessarily know” about how she presented herself in interviews.

She also discovered one advantage she had as a GTF in the UO’s Department of Economics that students from many of the larger programs across the U.S. didn’t have. “I was the only one in my group with any teaching experience,” Cil says. “The opportunity to teach classes is not something every graduate student receives.”