As the season turns to fall, it’s a good reminder to check in with how your career preparation is going. In past newsletters, we have shared tips and resources about career exploration, self-assessments, informational interviews, assessing readiness for academic careers and other elements that are so essential to the career preparation process. Regardless of your next job, it can help you to spend time reflecting on skills, competencies and unique strengths you’ve developed through graduate school and during your postdoc…
For the past three years, Core Programs has hosted a communication skills workshop with the goal of sharing effective strategies international graduate students can use when communicating with faculty. Below are a just a few of these communication best practices. These tips are useful not only for international graduate students but also all graduate students across the University of Washington. Be proactive. Faculty panelists at our workshops have stated that despite their busy schedules, they truly appreciate hearing from their…
“How can I learn to recognize my students whose ethnicity is different from my own? I feel bad that it takes me much longer to remember their names and faces, and I have even mixed up some of the students, calling them by the wrong name. They deserve better! I do study the photographs we get on MyUW of the students in a class, but that doesn’t seem to help much.”* — Anonymous Dear Anonymous, Thanks for writing in! This is…
The Graduate School recognizes exceptional scholarship and research at the master’s and doctoral levels. These awards recognize a thesis and a dissertation in four categories: Biological Sciences, Humanities & Fine Arts, Mathematics, Physical Sciences & Engineering, and the Social Sciences. Meet the winners of this year’s Distinguished Thesis Award (awarded in three of the four categories). [expand title = “Biological Sciences: Matthew Coates, master’s in public health in Global Health Metrics and Evaluation ’17, Department of Global Health”] Thesis: Quantifying Selection Bias from Birth…
Spring is the time of year where several big projects come to the fore. Your to-do lists may include one—or more—of the following: doing a job search, writing up your thesis or capstone summary, continuing work on that dissertation, defending your dissertation, or making arrangements to move with your family after graduation. And by no means are these small tasks. So it’s no wonder why, for different reasons (a task feels too big, intimidating, or the long-term benefits don’t seem…
It can be so exciting to get a job offer or to find a postdoc position that it can be tempting to look no further. However, finding the right “fit” involves many dimensions beyond just the research focus. Universities, companies, governmental agencies, and non-profits each have their own cultures. Furthermore, individual departments or even specific research groups may operate with their own norms and practices. Regardless of your sector, you will spend a lot of your waking life at work….
The UW Office of the Provost sent an e-mail to faculty and teaching assistants outlining concrete recommendations for sustaining “vibrant classroom discussions at a time when current events have produced sharp political differences among us.” The goal of the message was to equip all of our instructors with best practices to “establish… respectful class discussions in which students from across the spectrum may fully engage.” As we all wrap up the Winter Quarter and prepare for Spring, there might be…
Greetings! How has your summer been? If it’s been like ours, there’s been some hard work, some good play, and continual reminders of why we do student affairs work in the Graduate School. Every time we have the privilege of talking with graduate students, we are in awe of your tenacity and creativity. Some of you may be winding up summer quarter, some may be deep in research mode, others may just be getting started. We at Core Programs just…
You have ideas what you are passionate about, and you have spent years cultivating expertise. Now, how do you get your voice heard? How can you work to advance the issues? How can you influence change? In mid-April, the Office of Postdoc Affairs co-hosted a workshop from the OpEd Project, a national effort to diversify the voices we hear in public conversations. The facilitator Michele Weldon has 3 decades as a public thought leader through her books, articles, and media…
Many of you are thinking about research questions, arguments, and citations for your final seminar papers. Some of you are close to beginning work on your thesis or dissertation. This may also be the first time you are engaging with graduate-level writing, if you are an incoming or first-generation graduate student. Fortunately, there are a number of campus-based and online resources that offer tips and tools to help you progress and complete these writing projects. For example, the following insights…