Chair: James Noble
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, kjx@mcs.vuw.ac.nz

The 2002 OOPSLA Doctoral Symposium is preparing the leaders of the future of object-oriented technology. In the symposium, a selected group of doctoral students present their work and obtain guidance from university and industry mentors and other symposium participants. The goal of the symposium is to expose students to helpful criticism before their thesis defense and to provide advice on future research and employment.

We encourage doctoral students who have established a thesis topic to apply to present their work at the symposium (see the Call for Participation on the OOPSLA web page). As in the past, this year's selected participants will be chosen on the basis of the mentors' evaluation of the students' descriptions of their research, and whether the work was sufficiently advanced to have some preliminary results but with sufficient time remaining to benefit from the symposium experience.

Mentors have traditionally been selected from respected individuals in the OOPSLA community, such as established researchers, members of the program committee, workshop leaders, etc. Their mission is not only to be constructively critical about the current status of the work, but also to give advice to where the work should focus and stress the future direction for successful completion of the doctoral work. This year's mentors are Prof. Alan Borning (The University of Washington), Dr. Dirk Riehle, Dr. Mira Mezini (University of Siegen and Northeastern University), Dr. Mario Wolczko (Sun Microsystems Laboratories Inc.) and Dr. James Noble (Victoria University of Wellington).

Due to the mentoring nature of the event, the symposium itself will only be open to those selected for participation. So OOPSLA attendees can meet the students and discuss their research, all doctoral symposium presenters will have a poster on display during the conference and a two-page short paper published in the Conference Companion proceedings. These provide opportunities for additional feedback and suggestions on the dissertation work, contacts for further interaction, and experience in communicating with other professionals. Each student also receives a certificate of participation and support to attend the conference.