Description

Enhance graduate student success by providing academic support programs.

Sample Projects

• Provide tutoring
  • Engage with Knack, which provides a peer tutoring program. Currently Knack is being piloted for a selection of graduate-level courses for the Fall 2024 term. It is also used at the undergraduate level.
  • Encourage academic programs to have tutoring programs in their disciplines
  • Create a tutoring program for 1-2 common high-demand topics (such as statistics). This is a topic-based as opposed to course-based approach to tutoring.
• Provide short courses or bootcamps to target foundational knowledge for a discipline
  • For example, ECE is offering the Mathematics of ECE Workshop (a 7 session series) “Mathematics of ECE workshop has been created to help ECE students master key mathematical tools. This is not a formal course attached to any class, this is the time to ask all the questions you want in a friendly and supportive environment! “
• Improve awareness of existing academic support resources (such as the Communications Lab and CETL language courses for international students)
  • Roadblock: Students often complain that they are bombarded with information, so it is hard for them to really pinpoint the resources they need. What is the best way to collect all the current resources and make it accessible to all students?
• Provide support for prerequisite knowledge for incoming graduate students in an academic program
  • Create a library of common knowledge basics of on-demand online modules. This can be problem sets, curated textbooks/resources, video lectures, etc.
  • The idea would be for this repository to be a first-stop for any background knowledge a graduate student is struggling with, before one-on-one human tutoring is sought out
  • Need to be careful we don’t include too much information on the surface---if a student is relatively new to a topic, they may not know what to look for.
• Provide courses or programs to support students doing independent projects such capstones and theses
  • Project management for capstones or theses – provide templates, structures (e.g., Notion, Asana), facilitate meetups 
  • Teach research methods courses in disciplines
    • Create common core modules for research methods courses that could be shared across disciplines or done asynchronously by students
    • Teach PhD students how to identify and define research topics independently
    • Teach teamwork. From K-12 through PhD level students are often required to work in groups “so they learn how” but very little actual instruction on how to work with others (especially of different skill/knowledge levels) effectively is ever given. How does one work best if one is more knowledgeable/skillful than everyone else on the team, if one is less knowledgeable/skillful than everyone else on the team, etc.? How should roles be defined, etc.?