Listening Session Jamboard Content

The following content (raw data) was collected on Jamboards during breakout sessions during the strategic plan listening sessions on Sept. 29, Sept. 30 and Oct. 1, 2021. View the “Listening Session Jamboard and Follow Up Survey Synopsis.”

Listening Sessions Page

What is going well?

Session 1, Group 2

• Meeting with students regularly.
• building up experiential learning opportunities that improve success and retention
• Our Chair asks all instructors to send him the names of students doing well in our courses who have not declared a major. He sends them a letter congratulating them on their work and inviting them to chat with an advisor.
• We have an excellent UG advisor but he advises over 800 students.  So while we are good at this we need more folks dedicated to this role
• We have an excellent UG advisor but he advises over 800 students.  So while we are good at this we need more folks dedicated to this role

Session 1, Room 4

• More focus in engaging students with faculty-led research.  This connects them to department and improves retention.  Seems to help with recruiting, too.
• Comm/Media – retention from declaration of major – graduation.
• Retention rate is increasing, graduation rate increasing in BS and MBS program.
• Biomolecular Research Center – undergraduate research opportunities that improve our STEM pipeline
• Streamline of degree program and offering required courses at least yearly increased graduation rates of majors.

Session 2, Room 1

• Creating a new online MA program for History teachers across the state.
• I have met with students individually in order to determine what support they feel they need in order to succeed.
• Getting students to publish their work.

Session 2, Room 2

• (Biology) Moving students through difficult classes rather well through support services.
• Advising – we’re proactive in working with students to make sure they are able to take classes they need to complete requirements.  (World Languages – JH)
• Offering VIP courses as opportunities for student engagement and success.
• [MDS] Advising team is doing well in helping move students from unenrolled to enrolled.
• Building reflection into our core courses has helped identify needs for support.
• Prior Learning Assessment – Students are able to assess their prior learning and get credit, leading to them being able to take more credits and graduate earlier than before.
• Being thoughtful about meeting students’ needs and accommodating them. Providing flexibility whenever possible (MICHAL)

Session 2, Room 5

• We provide lots of experiential learning opportunities
• Student undergraduate research opportunities
• Retention rates are good, we are good at “threading the needle” in course offerings and degree path adjustments to enable student success

Session 3, Room 1

• What we do well: First Year Writing, ALP model (ENGL 101P) and part of what the culture of the program focuses on is student success.
• Efforts in FYW are paying off in retention and student satisfaction
• Undergraduates participate in research in anthropology and can present at conferences
• Required advising each semester is working really well for our students!
• More knowledge of resources and ability to share them with students.

Session 3, Room 2

• Michael: Heartwarmed and energy put behind flexibile teaching intiatives. Giving access to students for assignments and testing, flexible deadlines; flexible teaching

Session 3, Room 3

• Building community with fully online students
• We utilize available systems (e.g., enrollment data) to remain engaged with students.
• Our recruiters, advisors, and faculty members all collaborate to help support students and retain them to graduation.
• Course redesigns based on student feedback.
• Building student community through synchronous and asychronous efforts.
• Integration of academic advising into curriculum for specific touch points each semester.

Session 3, Room 4

• meeting students where they are
• Currently there is More student focus on student success/advising/mentoring…
• More bridging the students to community and also alumni to the university
• Strength looking at institutional barriers that inhibit student success.
• Setting up systems that allow for mentoring and peer support. Psych.
• meeting students where they are

Session 3, Room 5

• BAS/MDS: Credit for Prior Learning as powerful student retention and success opportunity
• Online opportunites
• Graduate student support, tuition support, pairing students with mentors in their fields, support for publishing costs, conference and poster costs, etc.
• Chemistry Instructional Center – students who use tutor center raise their GPA compared to those who do not.
• BAS/MDS: equal number of advisors and faculty. Coordinate and collaborate on student success.
• Chemistry dept scholarship used as a merit based reward

Challenges?

Session 1, Room 2

• Retention challenges are unique for nontraditional students.
• Advising challenges: Extra work on faculty to advertise majors.
• Advising challenges: Extra outreach to students.
• Advisors for other programs advising students NOT to major in a language.
• Students thinking / being told that they should just test out of a language and not capitalize on their prior knowledge by taking more language courses.
• Need more advising support.

Session 1, Room 4

• Students switching majors half-way through program and not having data to support why that is
• More directly connecting all majors to jobs/careers after graduation.
• Finding research projects for more (all?) majors.

Session 1, Room 5

• We have traditional tracks, but we aren’t really analyzing whether our degrees, assessment, curricula are best serving our students

Session 2, Room 1

• Challenges: recruiting and retaining students with little to no funding to offer.
• Student retention and success will no longer have the same strategies and metrics post Covid
• Students are reassessing their needs and we should similarly reassess our models.
• Crowley – Phil has a hard time working out why we get the outcomes we get
• 1. Identifying students who might benefit from support. 2. Some students are hesitant to accept support that could help them be more successful. I’m not sure how to reach out to them.
• Crowley – Phil – managing advising – how do we do this in a way that scales? How do we work out what we do care about/what we should care about? How do we allocate work across faculty and still maintain some level of consistency?
• Keeping up from day to day. Fatigue is setting in.

Session 2, Room 2

• Better sharing of opportunities and resources across departments and units.

Session 2, Room 5

• Growth!  More advising and keeping track = success
• creative solution-generation to enable student success!
• 1 Dedicated advisor (UG) to help 850 undergrads —does a really good job helping students
• curricular flexibility to help students

Session 3, Room 1

• Challenge: We do not have enough time to engage struggling students the way they need it.  Or if we find the time, that workload is not acknowledged.
• Challenge: Students are struggling a lot this year, and we need more opportunity to engage them one on one.
• decision fatigue
• Supporting students takes so much time!! That time often isn’t reflected in evaluations
• So many student needs in terms of mental health. Instructors often carry the burden of checking in with students and pointing them to resources. We aren’t really trained to help them with these issues.
• Hard to know how flexible to be with students when they miss lots of class for COVID or mental health or personal issues. So many decisions to make about what is fair, but also extra time to provide that flexibility.
• Students are so busy with part-time jobs, which they need to be able to pay for school. As a result, their success in school suffers.
• TIME

Session 3, Room 2

• Manda: Some people are on-fire on the ground. We have unfortunately hired people who are unpreapred and freshman have no preparation for campus-life when they are asynchronous. Need more basic support to increase retention meaningfully and aligned with their goals, espeically first year students. More modality. Faculty are overburdened and burnt out being on multiple modalities. Problems are being overlooked by our very large successes, specifically on the individual student level.
• Tension exists between enrollment and retention; can we serve these students if we increase enrollment? Who do we serve? It is a matter of integrity to say what programming and support we do have so we can appropriately enroll students. Admit students only what we can support and not more by changing policies.
• Solen Smith: English department enrollments are low and need pressure to get new students. Flexibility requires 1 on 1 responsiveness and we should be encouraging more faculty members to work closely with students. Need more freedom to use low faculty/student ratio to recruit and see as a strength rather than see it as a weakness or try to reverse from above specfically. Identify strengths of both low and high faculty to student ratios and implementing them appropriately/flexibly.
• Kim: We don’t know our graduates and we can’t support them. Students fail because they feel they have no community. Fell almost reprimanded for supporting students on a human and connect with them. Missing the mark on connections and keeping them here via community!
• Kristen: Faculty members are spreading thin and we don’t have the budgets to be transdiciplinary- how are we compensating faculty for that?

Session 3, Room 3

• Low stipends are creating recruitement and retention problems. No increase in rates since late 1990’s
• Pandemic, mental health, financial issues
• Building community in entirely online communities… students are distributed and have other (e.g., family, work) demands
• Time available to students to work directly with students and not having a substantial institutional mechanism for those efforts.
• Financial and other challenges are starting to and seemingly will only create more challenges to retention… see issues of graduate stipends on next questions ~>
• Helping faculty see multilingual students from an asset-based, rather than deficit-based, lens

Session 3, Room 4

• time for course coordinators to revise/improve courses
• balancing high fall enrollment with low spring enrollment
• student placement discrepancies
• Too many students and not enough faculty. Class size is too large in some areas.
• Access due to Covid/ Seat assignments is disconnecting students
• burnout of full time faculty/staff

Session 3, Room 5

• Bringing more diversity throughout the college programs. Being able to collaborate more between art and science and non-traditional departments
• Holistic connections between COAS departments

In Five Years?

Session 1, Room 2

• I hope that we are growing our program, more course sections for students to choose from!
• Increase direct support to students (i.e advising, degree value translation, etc.).  And more experiential learning opportunities for students.
• Greater long-term consistency in student success resources (less time on faculty to learn and re-learn revolving initiatives)

Session 1, Room 4

• More data on what motivates students to switch majors/ not graduate in the program
• Continued numbers of students involved in research
• I hope that we will be serving larger numbers of underrepresented students, including rural, Hispanic, other minorities.
• Incorporating Internships to support students with professional networking
• Hoping that in 5 years we have more traditional students – first-year students attending after highschool

Session 2, Room 1

• That our graduate students will collaborate with other grad students across the college and university, thereby increasing interdisciplinary work that can solve current and future issues.
• Crowley – Phil – in 5 years we will have a robust mechanism for building and maintaining community – something like music’s zero credit class for majors ….
• I hope to provide relevant experiential learning experiences for students that seek careers in Idaho.
• I hope that we will have established a community where students are more familiar with the support available to them and are enthusiastic about drawing on that support. More peer mentorship.
• Crowley – Phil – we’ll have finally sorted out meaningful service learning for Phil majors. I suspect/hope that this will involve collaborations with units oriented toward addressing community level challenges (e.g. School of Environment, School of Computing, School of Art etc.)

Session 2, Room 5

• More options / concentrations with clear paths to get their degree
• Easier path to transdisciplinary degree

Session 3, Room 1

• More campus and university support for reaching out to struggling students and helping them through health/mental health challenges

Session 3, Room 2

• Everyone identify ways they can support students, incoming and existing, in their roles. Find innovative solutions for individual problems within budgetary situation.
• Help faculty become more transdiciplinary through budgetary support. (Kristen)

Session 3, Room 3

• I would like students to feel engaged in a community of pre-professionals who are preparing for careers. In this sense, I want them to feel engaged in both the community of current students, the broader community of students in that area, and an industry / career community.

Session 3, Room 4

• Time for faculty, staff and programs to build out these plans for success and strategies… Time to implement..
• more professional staff to help with overall coordination more lecturers to help with course design improvements, as is we are barely implementing current practices while seeing many places for improvement

What is going well?

Session 1, Group 6

• Managing to get some done during a pandemic! Scrappy
• Growing awareness of inequities with research programming in humanities and/or departments
• More conversations are taking place around diversity of scholarship
• SOA giving 25k to faculty to propel research initiatives
• More collaboration is happening (anti-racism, soc department)
• Writing articles, attending conferences
• Good: engaging students in cutting edge research.
• grant activities, other writing, presentations
• Organizing film festivals ( in normal times) thanks to a grant from the French government
• Good: funded research opportunities for students help them after they graduate — jobs and grad school
• Reviewing books and films for journals–great way to stay on top of new research and creative activity in my field.
• Raising Boise State profile in the research world and academia
• Training students (undergraduate and graduate)
• Submitting grants, writing papers, attending and presenting at conferences.

Session 1, Group 3

• Erick: Figuring things out, working to fulfill interdisciplinary mission by meeting with people from other units and in the community.
• Sam and dawn: Our unit (FYWP) is working hard to use research/data to meet student needs, doing research on student needs (EBNE, progress and sequencing, etc.)

Session 1, Group 5

• Making the most of what we have, being efficient with resources and ensuring that they all go to valuable activity – ADVS
• Bringing in sponsored projects for our research needs. We have increased the number of awards we have brought in over the past several years – GeoSciences
• Supporting faculty and student research, summer revenue supports student conferences, memberships – Psychology

Session 2, Group 1

• Engaging undergrads in research
• Intradepartmental collaboration
• Community-centered scholarship [MICHAL]
• We are publishing in well respected venues, at national and international conferences
• We are publishing research that impacts our respective fields and, in some cases, has immediate impacts on our classroom and community.
• Making research more accessible to students traditionally underserved [MICHAL]

Session 2, Group 2

• Providing support for faculty research needs -CC
• Encouraging individual students to participate in research and fit that research into their academic plan. Clay

Session 2, Group 4

• Philosophy (SCrowley) – we are a happy community.
• Success at extramural awards, training students, disseminating results, etc. all with less support than our competitors.
• Undergraduate research experience
• Undergraduate/graduate education
• Integrating research ideas into teaching

Session 3, Room 1

• Community engagement, working across disciplines/colleges/units
• Building better cross department relationships to expand options for both faculty & students
• Building capacity and adapting scholarship for productivity

Session 3, Room 2

• What we do well: Boyer Model
• What we do well: Invite students into research and creative activity.
• This program sucks. [NOTE: The “This Program Sucks” sticky note was a joke while we were figuring out how to post on jamboard. It was not directed at any program–more our inability to jamboard.]

Session 3, Room 3

• Kim: This year, with COVID, has thrown everyone for a loop and we all have had to be creative! Online poetry readings, classes, all integrated without a hitch. People have been bringing up good ideas and implementing them effectively all over campus.
• Manda: Scholarly activity from the Speech and Debate team have been able to keep a successful and purposeful activity regardless this year. Is a double-edged sword opens up innovation and creative solutions but also new barriers and problems. Are students prepared for success in pedagogical context when instruction is online? Keeping things running in an innovative way, and no balls have been dropped although other educational institutions have had to sacrifice and make deep cuts.
• Michelle: Speech and Debate has been incredibly successful and continue to maintain those high standards with such great student outcomes should be highlighted more. 3 things to do: 1- Broaden communication conference, where undergrads can submit research and be a speaker on a panel which is incredibly helpful. May even to performative work; panel of best practices; digital performances to present. 2- Programs are fully online and building community is difficult with 1,000 students. Age groups are moving younger but have a sizable non-traditional students base. Build innovation and creativity into curriculum. Restructure classes to emphasize innovative thinking and empathetic thinking. 3- Use external partnerships with VR

Session 3, Room 4

• Getting good at bringing in external funding
• Good at cross-campus collaborations to increase funding success
• Getting good at bringing in external funding.
• More funding, broader coalitions of investigators, bigger proposals, more interdisciplinary
• Policies and procedures for operations

Session 3, Room 5

• Sean Ruettgers: growth of majors good; additional students with research emphasis with more publications, dept faculty more accepting of lab in another building
• Baker Lawley: focus is on experiential learning specifically–this is new. program is innovative.
• Jill Annie Margaret–COVID separations hard/challenges
• BAS/MDS program is all clinical or adjunct faculty–why? Effectively excluded from Research and Creativity opportunity/recognition (but do it anyway)

Session 3, Room 6

• GEO faculty generate approximately $5M in external funding and publish scores of papers/yr. We do well incorporating grad students in research.
• We’re doing a ton!
• Just published a book!
• We don’t keep track as a unit (Linguistics) of our research, but we all do a lot
• Participating in a variety of conferences and creative activities (including creative teaching strategies) during the pandemic
• Lecturer… no research component

Challenges?

Session 1, Group 6

• In the Arts and Humanities, more support is needed for those faculty who want to write grants for their scholarship. Time and resources.
• It seems that only funded grants are acknowledged for things like T&P, when the process of writing and submitting a grant should also be recognized.

Session 1, Group 2

• TIME!!! Never enough time, especially during a pandemic.
• Budget process that taxes carry-forward from research startup accounts undermines the universities research goals and plays havoc with budgets.  Crazy to tax startup funds.
• processes here at Boise State make it hard to hire people as consultants for a grant; policy seems to always be in flux;
• hard to find external funding for certain types of projects—e.g. to support development of software/apps for education
• Pandemic curtailing international travel
• ditto — pandemic related issues with traveling to conferences.
• INADEQUATE INFRASTRUCTURE – no backup power for the building in our labs, under-resourced OSP, mix of micromanaging lab supplies and challenges with making purchases
• Very challenging to gather sufficient startup funds to attract faculty members who need to build a research program that can attract sizeable external grants.
• start/stop of experiments due to COVID exposures etc.
• Pre-award

Session 1, Group 3

• Can we differentiate donations and grants? Could things go through Foundations through Foundations?

Session 1, Group 5

• Pandemic
• Staffing issues
• Budget cutbacks  – limits on what funding can be used for
• Space – no space in departmental buildings

Session 2, Group 1

• Facilities and support
• Community Partnerships
• TIME!
• Lack of internal financial and infrastructure support for humanities research. [MICHAL]
• Interdepartmental – transdisciplinary work

Session 2, Group 2

• Demands of teaching and service in a department with a very high faculty-to-student ratio compete with research time in a very significant way. — CC
• For me personally, I see a lot of student individually so delivering a message about research opportunities repetitively is tough.

Session 2, Group 4

• The challenge is the current university structure and budget
• Philosophy (SCrowley) – challenge – we don’t have a clear community level idea of innovation or change – where we will be in
• Infrastructure, space, ability to make moves/changes swiftly
• Not enough grants accounting, project management, pre-award support, etc.
• Infrastructure, OSP, accounting…
• Time and compensation don’t align. There is no reward for productivity.
• Time–so much time to learn new LMS/Canvas and juggle changes in teaching during a pandemic — all taking away from time for research
• University’s structure limits us in the innovation being asked for
• Fatigue, morale, attitude
• Credit for collaborative work or transdisciplinary research activity.

Session 3, Room 1

• One challenge is time! Teaching is always time consuming, as are service responsibilities, and sometimes finding time/making time for research can be challenging. The pandemic has made this even more challenging.
• Another challenge is related to funding – more support for grant writing would be great.
• Challenged in finding time to actually produce scholarship.
• Time & funding – Only so many hours in a day and so many dollars in the bank. With the unknowns of this past year, creative solutions are needed and take additional time.

Session 3, Room 2

• Challenges: Overloaded with teaching. Burnout. Emotional Labor. Doing more, but still only meets expectations.
• Challenges: Budget model.
• Department Formally Known As English

Session 3, Room 3

• Students lacking resources and supporting them equally regardless of resource access.
• Are students prepared for success in pedagogical context when instruction is online?

Session 3, Room 4

• Doesn’t seem to be the same effort or support structure to support all of the succesfull awards on the back end at the college and department level
• Support infrastructure for managing and executing large-scale awards
• Other institutions have seemed to figure this out… hopefully we are liaising with them and learning from them?
• There seems to be a lack of knowledge across the university about what research centers and opportunities are available and how they can help with funding opportunites, student growth and support, and provide incentives and opportunities for new faculty
• F&A agreements for centers and institutes cut out departments/COAS of F&A… how does COAS support centers and institutions between their inception and when they’re large enough to self-sustain?
• As a university, if Research is the goal, we need more structured support at the university level to help grow research centers, collaborations, F & A reinvestment options, maybe a pooled fund to help replace equipment.
• Departments and colleges often have different ways of accomplishing the same goals.  There can be challenges, when we cross-collaborate, with expectations and defined roles.

Session 3, Room 6

• Helping others understand the connection between service/admin and scholarship. Spreading the Boyer Model
• Geo: Sometime restricted by need for more technical support
• Geo: Could do better incorporating ugrads in research
• Time. Finding the time to coordinate with all of our PI’s on grant submissions and progress.
• Many lecturers are participating in research and creative activity on top of a full teaching and service load. Maybe there could be some possibility of course releases for major projects?
• Geo: Low graduate student stipends are creating recruitment and retention problems
• We’re doing a ton, but we need help getting the word out about all that we are doing!

In Five Years?

Session 1, Group 2

• Hopefully more in person events and more travel! :)
• life is a big question mark right now
• Begin to have more impact in my field. Hone my projects.

Session 2, Group 1

• Given the current pandemic, it’s hard to think that far in advance.

Session 2, Group 2

• I hope there will be more support for faculty development early in their careers, especially around balancing research with other demands. Getting faculty started off strong is really important to their future research success.
• Beyond my current role I would like to have time and resources to create a culture that supports student participation in research
• Would like to see much more sharing of undergraduate research stories of success within the college and university.

Session 2, Group 4

• 5 years we will have shared models of the creative activity we want to engage in.
• Philosophy (SCrowley) – 5 years – We will have a model of how to promote philosophy as intrinsically valuable *and* instrumentally valuable (supporting the creative activity of others) and we will know how to operationalize that model.
• happy faculty, students, and staff
• State of the art facilities
• equitable compensation across all faculty ranks, student levels, staff, etc.
• system supports and values shared creative activity
• System supports and values shared collaborative creative work / research

Session 3, Room 1

• I want to be known for producing exceptional creative scholarship because I want my unit to be known for this.

Session 3, Room 3

• Speech and Debate has been incredibly successful and continue to maintain those high standards with such great student outcomes should be highlighted more.
• Broaden communication conference, where undergrads can submit research and be a speaker on a panel which is incredibly helpful. May even to performative work; panel of best practices; digital performances to present.
• Build innovation and creativity into curriculum. Restructure classes to emphasize innovative thinking and empathetic thinking.
• Emphasize external partnerships.

Session 3, Room 4

• More support infrastructure on the back end for managing and executing larger/more complex projects

Session 3, Room 6

• Geo: Increase our population of Research Professors
• Geo: Increase graduate stipend quantity and rate
• More long-term projects including collaboration with colleagues at BSU and other institutions.

What is going well?

Session 2, Group 1

• Maintaining customer service and student experience despite budget cuts
• Still in the black!

Session 2, Group 2

• Providing clear feedback and information for our PIs regarding spending/budgeting on grants and awards.

Session 3, Room 1

• Strategizing in order to use our funds wisely

Session 3, Room 4

• I feel that we succeed in supporting other departments within COAS at every opportunity, including open communication and streamlining processes and reducing duplication where we can.
• We try to be a very self-sufficient department and keep open communication with the college and campus in general

Challenges?

Session 2, Group 1

• Can’t find good applicants for office position b/c hourly wage too low
• Budget cuts and one-time holdbacks.
• Facilities and support for repairs and necessary upgrades

Session 3, Room 6

• asking full time professional staff/faculty to work too much overtime to meet the needs of the students
• asking full time faculty and pro staff to work too much overtime to meet students needs
• HCM and Bronco Hub is taking time, not only with learning the new system, but also completing a task.  Completing an individual task takes much more time than it did in the past.
• There are only two of us in English Language Support Programs
• Bronco budget doesn’t seem to reward collaboration across departments and discourages cross-listing of courses. For example, we used to have theater majors taking Shakespeare in ENGL, but BB changed that.

Session 2, Group 2

• Navigating the new system and update in BroncoHub

Session 3, Room 1

• Being able to strategize with our funds when whole picture as a university is so in flux during this time.

Session 3, Room 4

• Departments and colleges often have different ways of accomplishing the same goals.  There can be challenges, when we cross-collaborate, with expectations and defined roles.

In Five Years?

Session 2, Group 2

• An ever-evolving, cohesive, and seamless connection between the University’s overall reporting systems and our own department reporting and tracking systems. Although we already do this very well, I think there are ways that we can work to help contribute to the way BroncoHub/Oracle does their reporting.

Session 3, Room 1

• Streamlining our internal department processes in order to identify and tackle redundancies and focus those efforts on other needs

What is going well?

Session 1, Room 4

• We are engaged with several transdisciplinary PhD programs.
• New hires are immediately becoming active in taking graduate students from interdisciplinary PhD programs.

Session 2, Room 1

• Providing hands on research experiences and value added programming leading to great jobs or academic pursuits for students.

Session 2, Room 2

• Graduated the first student in a new program, but there were other students who did not complete the program.
• VIP structure is working well with grad students.

Session 2, Room 5

• Graduate Advisor = key
• Target recruitment to cast a wide net
• Broad recruitment (local and international)

Session 3, Room 3

• Geo: Students are all involved in research, high rate of publication
• Geo: Frequent communication at faculty meetings keep everyone engaged
• More and more potential students know about our programs and consider Boise State.

Session 3, Room 5

• Fellow support for incoming students to get their research ideas started through supply funds, lab training, and mentor support
• Graduate student salary and tuition support while being paired with a mentor and gaining experience for the job market

Session 3, Room 6

• Grad & faculty collaboration. Also prioritizing the grad program,  eventually renovate and offer better spaces for current students and attract additional students.
• Working with grad students in interdisciplinary spaces.

Challenges?

Session 1, Room 4

• Under-resourced graduate programs… esp. BMOL lacks enough admin support.

Session 2, Room 1

• BANDWIDTH, FINANCIAL SUPPORT, INFRASTRUCTURE!

Session 2, Room 2

• Attracting grad students in the current housing market. Especially, international students who don’t have credit history
• Attracting international graduate students.
• interdisciplinary partnerships to support and fund graduate research
• No credit for URM outreach or VIP

Session 2, Room 5

• Looking for more funding; split assistantships?
• Space and facilities
• Need more funding more funding more funding

Session 3, Room 3

• Graduate stipends have not increased net… since early 2000s
• Increased stipends come at the expense of decreased numbers of awards
• MS programs are perhaps the most valuable degrees on campus but sometimes get less attention in favor of PhD programs
• Geo: We have an apprenticeship style of advising, which limits enrollment to faculty workload. We can’t grow unless we change our advising model or hire more faculty. But we like our advising model.
• Challenge to align faculty and student ideas / preferences about what a grad program ought to be or what it ought to do in the student’s life.

Session 3, Room 6

• Working with graduate students but not having this a part of workload.
• Low pay for GAs is becoming an increasing issue given increasing cost of living.
• Difficult to think about starting a program when considering the support needed to be successful.
• Difficult planning, grants are for 2 years but students need 5 years of support — PhD student funding.
• Hard to attract quality graduate students, with housing and competition for good students.

In Five Years?

Session 2, Room 1

• Greater levels of financial support to ensure faculty and student engagement.

Session 2, Room 5

• Broad programs that still retain individuality
• Long term goal of doctorate!  (currently have masters)

Session 3, Room 3

• Geo: We are gradually opening up our traditional disciplinary degrees to be accessible to other disciplines

Session 3, Room 6

• I hope that the university will create/improve mechanisms for faculty to be able to work with grad students across departments/schools/colleges
• Creation of well supported graduate programs in the Humanities & Social Sciences at both the MA/MS and PhD levels would be a great evolution.