Grad News Forum

Andy Friedland, Professor in the Environmental Studies program at Dartmouth, recently sat down with arts and sciences graduate students to discuss the essential elements of putting together a successful science proposal.

Entitled “Science Proposal Writing,” the workshop session was the first in the several-part series, “Becoming a Faculty Member,” sponsored by the Graduate Office.  Based on his and Provost Carol Folt’s 2009 book, Writing Successful Science Proposals, Friedland’s talk related to the complicated process that nearly all academics must go through: crafting a research proposal.

According to Friedland, the first step to writing a successful proposal is fairly simply: write well.  While there are basic fundamental common factors in all proposals, Friedland stressed that it is essential to look at the specific vernacular unique to each individual scientific field.  This includes identifying and describing the conceptual framework of your project, as well as summarizing the relevant literature and targeting your proposal to your specific audience (i.e., NIH, NSF, EPA, NASA, etc).

Aside from the obvious plus of writing a successful proposal—funding—there is also the added bonus of being able to flesh out potential research topics.  “Writing a proposal forces you to put ideas on paper, formulate them, and let them grow,” Friedland told the crowd of PhD students in attendance, noting that scientists often make major advances while working on the proposals alone.

Noting the current trend towards scientific projects with an interdisciplinary focus, Friedland noted the importance of “thinking big” in the initial stages of working on a proposal.  “It’s important to avoid tunnel vision,” says Freidland.  “Think about how your work might apply to other fields.”

Targeted towards those arts and sciences graduate students who plan on continuing their careers in academia, the “Becoming a Faculty Member” series aims to help graduate students make the transition to professor while allowing Dartmouth faculty to share their strategies and tips for navigating the path to ‘becoming faculty.’  Those students who attend all of the workshops in the series will receive a certificate of completion.

The next session, “Finding Funding,” takes place Wednesday, January 18^th, at 12pm.  Hosted by Brian Pogue, Dean of Graduate Studies and Professor of Engineering at Thayer School, the session will highlight the various funding sources that graduate students, postdocs, and assistant professors can access at the beginning of their research careers.

The “Mentoring and Advising” session will take place on Wednesday, January 25^th, at 12 pm, and will feature Dartmouth faculty members who have won the Graduate Student Mentoring Award discussing their own unique approaches to mentorship.  To sign up for this session, click HERE.  To sign up for “Lab Management” on Monday, January 30th, at 12pm, sign up HERE.

In the latest movie produced by the Graduate Studies Office, international graduate student reflect upon their studies at Dartmouth. Featuring interviews from students in five of Dartmouth’s Arts & Sciences graduate programs, the newly-released movie explores the international community in Hanover.

Directed by Tennile Sunday
Filmed & Edited by Wesley Whitaker

The academic departments within the Arts and Sciences graduate programs couldn’t exist without its administrative professionals.  The Graduate Studies Office and the Grad News Forum would like to thank all of these valuable employees for their efforts.

From now until August 31st, all administrators and administrative staff within graduate departments who sign-up to receive updates from the Graduate News Forum will receive a gift certificate to the Dirt Cowboy.

To sign up, enter your contact information in the “Subscribe to the Grad News Forum” panel on the right-hand side of the homepage.

Don’t worry if you’ve already signed up for updates from the Grad News Forum—stop by for a gift certificate, anyway!  Please come to 304 Wentworth Hall to pick up your gift card.

Thanks for all of your hard work!

Pictured: Jordan Noonan, Admissions Specialist in the Graduate Studies Office

Photo by: E. O’Flaherty

Dear Dartmouth Graduate Community,

Our Dartmouth Academic year has ended with a flourish, having a graduation ceremony with Conan O’Brien capping things off in his address to the campus in his own hilarious manner.   This was a historic year with 82 graduating PhDs and over 100 Masters degrees awarded.  On campus this summer, graduate students are either departing for internships or permanent jobs, or digging deeply into their thesis research.

This past year we saw the creation of a new Graduate Studies logo, shown above, initiated by our own students and completed through an online competitive design process.  It shows the iconic Dartmouth lone pine tree with the waves of the Connecticut River that embrace the campus boundary.  The year 1885 in the logo was the year of the first graduate degree awarded at Dartmouth.  We have come a long way in 125 years!   Dartmouth is now categorized by the Carnegie Foundation as a Research University with very high research activity, and the academic success of our students attests to this.

This year, Dartmouth Board of Trustees elected the first Graduate Studies alumni.  Marye Anne Fox, Ph.D. ’74 (Chemistry), who is now Chancellor of University of California San Diego, will join the board for a 3 year term.  In 2010, President Obama presented her with the highest scientific honor in the country, the National Medal of Science. We look forward to welcoming her to campus in the fall, and having her leadership within the Trustees.

We continue to shape our outward image, and you will see that our website has a new look and our Graduate Forum newsletter is now online and updated with human interest stories weekly. Check it out!  You will be amazed at what Dartmouth graduate students and faculty are up to! Look for our smart phone app, being designed by Jane Seibel, Assistant Dean for Recruiting and Diversity, to be released this fall.  It will help prospective and newly admitted students get acquainted with the campus.

We have had a terrific series of professional training events for graduate students, run by Kerry Landers, Assistant Dean for Student Affairs. These events serve to advise students in all aspects of the job search process, business training, entrepreneurship and ethics, all of which help them round out themselves outside of their academic training.  Notably, the Dartmouth Center for Advancement of Learning, together with Professor Carl Renshaw from the Department of Earth Sciences, started an NSF funded program called GK-12, which trains graduate students to present their work to a general student audience, from Kindergarten to grade 12.  This program funds up to 8 students per year and gives them a mentored experience working with teachers in the Upper Valley.   We also had a terrific event with Professors Tillman Gerngross, PhD, P. Jack Hoopes, DVM, PhD, and Hany Farid, PhD, discussing how to balance Academic and Industry interactions within the same career track.  Their experiences range from starting three pharmaceutical companies, to doing extensive contract research, to working with Microsoft and Google on novel software products. These intimate experiences between outstanding professors and our graduate students are one of the keys to their academic success at Dartmouth outside of their academic departments.

Because many of you are fully launched into a career, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that graduate students typically struggle for direction and focus throughout their years in graduate school.  The Graduate Alumni Research Award was created from your donations to provide students with financial support to do things that reward their own initiatives.  In this past year, we funded seven scholarships as listed below:

Barbara Stubbs, Master of Arts in Liberal Studies

Barbara is studying the identity that is expressed in Caribbean art and will research, identify and analyze contributing elements in a creative manner.   The funds will be used to allow her to conduct research in Jamaica.

Marcella Lucas, Neurology, Experimental and Molecular Medicine Marcella is researching the effect of early life epileptic seizures in animals with an abnormal brain.  The funds will be used to purchase 7 electrodes to record brain waves.

Josiah Proietti, Master of Arts in Liberal Studies

Josiah is studying the typology of rejection anxiety management styles through the initiation process of sexual relationships in college men.  The funds are being used to remunerate participants for their involvement in the study.

Ramsa Chaves-Ulloa, Biological Sciences

Ramsa will be investigating the ways in which land use, a factor known to affect aquatic insect community composition and emergence, affects the transport of nutrients, energy and contaminants from streams to terrestrial ecosystems.  The funds will be used to conduct mercury and isotopic analysis on spiders.

Max Overstrom-Coleman, Biology-Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Max is studying what is the relative importance of food and habitat provided by a foundation species, such as seagrasses, to marine food webs and fish?  The funds from this award would allow him to use state of the art stable isotope techniques at Dartmouth College.

Samuel Beal, Earth Sciences

Samuel is focused on developing records of aridity and wind dynamics from lakes in Peru to reconstruct tropical climate changes over the Holocene (the past 10,000 years.)  The funds will be used for dating samples using radiocarbon methods.

Wesley Whitaker, Master of Arts in Liberal Studies

Wesley will be researching Friedrich Von Hayek and John Maynard Keynes at Oxford University’s Exeter College.  The funding will be used for access to documents and travel.

I am writing to ask you to consider donating to the fund and take part in the Dartmouth tradition of alumni supporting current students. We use 100% of your donations to fund the annual Graduate Alumni Research Awards, and a new Graduate Studies Teaching Award.  If you think back to your own graduate days, imagine how much an award of $500 or $1000 would have meant to you.  Please contribute online.  We appreciate your ongoing support.

Contributing your time is also very welcome, and please do contact us if you would like to be more involved! Thank you for your time and active involvement with Dartmouth graduate students!

Brian W. Pogue, Ph.D., Dean of Graduate Studies at Dartmouth

Brian.Pogue@Dartmouth.edu

Dartmouth has recently ramped up efforts to meet the goal of addressing the needs of all students across its online media. Sarah Horton, director of web strategy, design, and instruction, said digital accessibility has been top of mind for campus administrators and educators for several years, but a new wave of accessibility initiatives is bringing its goal closer to realization.

Read the full story, published by Campus Technology on 06/09/11.

Ever want to get out of the classroom or lab and meet with your professor over an informal cup of coffee?

The Graduate Studies Office is happy to announce the kick-off of the “Take Your Professor Out for Coffee” promotion.

The first fifty graduate students who sign up to receive updates from “The Graduate News Forum” will receive a gift certificate to take their professor out for a cup of joe at Dirt Cowboy Café on Main Street.

Here’s the catch—You have to get your advisor to sign up for updates, too!  Send them this article, ask them to sign up to receive periodic updates on the Dartmouth graduate community from the Grad News Forum, and then you BOTH can indulge in a Dirt Cowboy caffeine break…. It’s a win-win situation.

If you and your advisor sign up by Friday, April 15^th, stop by the Graduate Studies Office (Wentworth Hall, Room 304) on Monday morning to pick up your gift certificate!

Dartmouth Graduate Studies recently partnered with Institutional Research, to conduct an annual survey of PhD students.  The survey was open to all 533 doctoral students at Dartmouth, including those in the Arts & Science, Medical School and Thayer School.

The survey collected data from 72% of the total current PhD students at Dartmouth.  Respondents were largely continuing graduate students, with first-year graduate students representing 20% of total survey respondents.

“The survey gives us a better understanding of doctoral students’ experiences at Dartmouth, and is necessary part of evaluating how our programs are doing in academic skills training” says Kerry Landers, Assistant Dean of Graduate Student Affairs.

Overall, graduate students deemed their academic experience at Dartmouth to be extremely positive.  Over 95% of students surveyed ranked faculty interactions as ‘good or excellent’ and over 85% of students rated the quality of advising to be similarly strong.  Additionally, over 90% of students surveyed indicated that they had gained additional knowledge through their study at Dartmouth, and over 92% ranked the quality of their fellow students as ‘very high’.

“The annual survey better enables us to understand the areas in which we are succeeding, and where there is room to improve,” says Brian Pogue, Dean of Graduate Studies.  “For example, we learned that travel to conferences for some students is perhaps not as high as we might like it to be.  So, related to this, the Graduate Studies office doubled the funding available to PhD students, allowing them up to $1000 for one-time travel to present at a scientific conference if they need the extra funding to make the trip.  We hope to study the data in different ways to determine if additional improvements can be found for the PhD student experience.”

The Graduate Studies Office would like to thank Lynn Foster Johnson and the rest of the Office of Institutional Research for their work in collecting and analyzing the survey data.

As a participation incentive, all PhD students who completed the survey were entered into a raffle for a $50 gift card to Canoe Club. The following students were randomly selected as the winners:

Joshua Brody
Paige Rinker
Lyubomir Zagorchev
Kristen Mascall
Samantha Reynolds
John Hammond
Neil Epstein
Gregory Feiden
Shaohan Hu
Yang Gao

Congratulations to all the winners!

The survey will be completed annually as part of the Graduate Studies function to work with students and faculty to assess graduate learning outcomes.

To the Dartmouth community:

Like you, I am deeply distressed by the devastating events in Japan. The level of destruction is staggering, and the crisis is not yet over. Many of us are wondering what we can do. I appreciate your desire to help. We are working with students and others to identify the best way for Dartmouth to contribute. I hope to share more information about that soon, and in the meantime, I encourage you to support the relief organization of your choice.

Thankfully, all Dartmouth students and faculty who were in Japan at the time of the earthquake are safe and accounted for. On campus, we worked with enrolled students from affected communities before the winter term ended, and we will continue to provide any necessary support. Please note that counseling is available through the Dartmouth College Health Service, reachable at (603) 646-9442 during regular business hours.

Sincerely,

Jim Yong Kim

From Dartmouth Now

Dean Pogue

On September 28, 2010, the National Research Council (NRC) published a report on the Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs describing survey data and analysis from across the country. The report, the NRC’s first since 1995, charts data from 212 universities with programs in 62 different fields of academic study. All research-based academic departments and programs will likely find useful peer analysis data contained within this report. While past reviews have focused on ranking programs based upon reputation, a major conclusion in this report was that the ability to provide precise rank numbers was not possible, due to the subjective nature of peer-based ranking.

The report showed five important example criteria and stated that the variance in the metrics was specific to the 5th and 95th percentile values of the rank distribution. The five example ways to rank programs were based upon peer-reputation, survey data, faculty research activity, student support and outcomes, and diversity. The rank bounds shown for each of these categories were the highest and lowest possible rank of each program. For example, a program could have 5th and 95th percentile rank values of 10 and 22 in diversity, indicating they have a high probability for ranking between 10th and 22nd amongst peer doctoral departments in diversity for that particular field.

The complexity of the data and the multi-parametric nature make it a challenge to interpret with precise values. However, several websites have graphically displayed the data for a comprehensive analysis. These range from The Chronicle of Higher Education which offers subscribers a full range of tools to examine the data, to www.Phds.org which provides this service free of charge (a website founded by a former Dartmouth Assistant Professor Geoff Davis, now senior researcher at Google Inc.). On these sites, users can select sets of criteria of interest to them and obtain ranked lists of doctoral granting programs at the institutions that match their goals. These sites are available for prospective PhD students or faculty who might consider factors such as research activity, student support, or diversity with varying levels of importance. This freedom of analysis was an explicit goal of the report.

The NRC report goes into detail about “Reputation-based” ranking approaches, which have dominated program assessments in the past, and contrasts this with its data-based analysis using the 20 metrics obtained from the participating programs. The reputation-based ranking approach (R-analysis) resulted from a selected survey of faculty opinions in each field of study. The results of the survey correlated to the size of the program. Therefore, the NRC concluded that previous rankings were distorted disproportionately to program size. This new survey of a data-based ranking system (S-analysis) was proposed as a more objective approach using 20 different quantitative measures of each program. Ultimately, however the NRC did not endorse the data-based approach as the “best” method, but rather as just one method of comparing across programs.

One of the challenges of a ranking approach is that it only works well when programs can be defined as part of a single discipline. One anomaly in the current system is that interdisciplinary programs are more strongly weighted, and yet interdisciplinary programs without obvious peer programs cannot be ranked. Such was the case with Thayer School of Engineering’s doctoral program which has always had a focus of integrating all engineering branches into one division of engineering science.

Overall, the NRC report concluded that faculty ranked “Research Activity” as the most important factor in the strength of a program. The four measures included in this category were percentage of faculty with research grants, number of publications per faculty per year, number of citations per paper, and percentage of faculty receiving prestigious awards. These are factors cross all academic departments and are not exclusive to doctoral granting programs.

Again, although this research activity metric was identified from the data, the report emphasized that individual students or programs may be at least as interested in other comparative measures (e.g., measures that assess student support or diversity). For example, Student Support and Outcomes (outcomes were measured as the percentage of graduates who secured academic positions) was one method of comparison considered important by faculty. Faculty and student diversity was another factor highlighted in the report, with the recognition that faculty diversity is very low—around 5 percent—in doctoral-granting programs, but that student diversity has grown and is nearly 10 percent overall. Participation of women in doctoral programs is up but varies considerably between fields, ranging from 11 percent in engineering at the low end to 39 percent in the humanities.

Concerns about the validity of the data in the report remain, as it was largely self-reported with publication and citation data being gathered from online indices. Individual programs and even entire fields of study feel their data is fundamentally flawed, and so it is hard to trust even the most rigorously gathered data sets. As with all data surveys, the results must be interpreted thoughtfully to avoid overstating the results.

The report also focuses on what has changed since the 1995 report, which was based on 1993 data, and discusses overall trends with a small percentage growth being seen in doctoral programs nationwide. It is challenging to directly relate these small national changes to Dartmouth, which has experienced significant growth in research. From 1993 to2005-06, sponsored research increased from $67 million to $187 million. Dartmouth’s STEM graduate programs have experienced change in response to this increased infusion of funded research, with increase in size and overall scholarly productivity.

This NRC report is rich with information that helps us reflect on and potentially identify ways to improve the Dartmouth research experience for all departments. I encourage you to explore this database, and use it to think about ways we can keep striving for innovative improvements to our academic programs.

Brian W. Pogue, Ph.D.,
Dean of Graduate Studies
Dartmouth College