Grad News Forum

The Graduate Office, in conjunction with the Office of Institutional Research, recently conducted a survey of Dartmouth graduate alumni in order to gauge their satisfaction with their Dartmouth experience.

The survey was sent out electronically to 738 Dartmouth PhD alumni, all of whom were at least five years removed from graduation. Data collection lasted three weeks, and 251 alums responded for a 34% overall response rate.

Overall, the results of the survey were highly encouraging. Eighty-seven percent of the graduate alumni surveyed feel that completing their Dartmouth graduate degree was ‘definitely worth the effort.’ Eighty-three percent of respondents use the skills from their specialty or general field on a daily basis, and 93% percent of alumni respondents believe that Dartmouth provided effective training in designing and executing research. Additionally, 92% of alums feel that their Dartmouth education has been instrumental in helping them think critically and identify problems/format solutions.

“Maintaining strong alumni connections within the Dartmouth graduate community is of the utmost importance to the Graduate Studies Office,” says Kerry Landers, Assistant Dean of Graduate Student Affairs at Dartmouth. “We’re thrilled that so many graduate alumni, several years after graduating, are still pleased with the overall quality of their Dartmouth experience.”

In terms of career placement, Dartmouth graduate alums fare extremely well in comparison to the general population. Eighty-two percent of respondents are currently employed full-time, with 57% currently working in the education sector. Graduate alums are also productive scholars: of the respondents working in four-year educational institutions, more than 64% of graduate alums are on a tenure-track faculty appointment, with 52% of respondents having published seven or more refereed journal articles since graduating from Dartmouth.

Some of the recent awards and accolades that Dartmouth graduate alumni have received include the National Medal of Science (Marye Anne Fox, PhD, Chemistry), as well as numerous teaching and research grants and awards from such prestigious institutions as the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Health, NASA, and the Fulbright Program. In June of 2011, Marye Anne Fox was also the first graduate alumnus in Dartmouth’s history to be elected to the Dartmouth Board of Trustees.

While the majority of graduate alums (80%) report that their academic experience at Dartmouth was ‘very good or excellent’, approximately half of the respondents felt that there is room for improvement in the development of career-focused skills such as managing people, budgets, and writing funding proposals.

“Many of the areas in which respondents expressed less enthusiastic support for—such as non-academic student life and non-academic career training—are areas that we have been aggressively targeting over the last few years by offering multiple workshops on professional development skills,” says Landers.

Brian Pogue, Dean of Graduate Studies, also commends the efforts currently being made to increase the satisfaction of graduate students at Dartmouth, both academically and non-academically. “Surveys such as this one allow us to recognize the areas in which we are already succeeding, while also helping us to identify opportunities for growth and improvement,” says Pogue.

 by Erin E. O’Flaherty

The DAM Interview

Samuel Bakhoum, a Dartmouth PhD ’10 and DMS ’13, was recently published in the December 15^th issue of Clinical Cancer Research.

Read more about Sam and his research in a recent article from Dartmouth Now.

Photo: Eli Burak ’00

Dear Graduate Community,

Greetings from Hanover!

I am writing to update you on the many exciting happenings in the graduate community. Dartmouth’s campus is in the midst of a strategic planning process and Graduate Studies is playing an active role in shaping future. We are leading a Graduate Education Working Group to help chart the path for the future of our programs. Graduate faculty, the Graduate Studies Office, and representatives from the Graduate Student Council have met bi-monthly to debate and pose ideas regarding directions for further growth and strengthening of our academic enterprise. The group has received input from faculty across academic disciplines and graduate students, as well as external evaluations by peer schools. We will be concluding our group efforts at the end of the term and submitting our report to Dartmouth Leadership soon after.

One of the results already arising from this group meeting is the initiative to reach out to PhD graduate alumni and find out more about their academic experiences. Recently, we have begun to survey our current graduate students and graduating students. Overall, they have reported high satisfaction with their graduate experience, and now we really need to get feedback from you, our graduate alumni. We have sent out the survey to PhD graduate alumni for whom we have current email addresses. As we move forward, we would like to stay more in touch with our graduate alumni, so please take a minute to update your records.

Hopefully, we are reaching many of you already! The Graduate Studies Office has taken to social media, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, and The Graduate Forum. Each of these sites is a way for you to keep current on news and developments in the Dartmouth graduate community. We welcome stories on graduate alumni in the news and pictures for our Flickr page. Many graduate alumni and graduate students have joined our LinkedIn group. Access to all of these Graduate Studies media sites has been made easier with our new iPhone and Android phone app, which you can download for free on iTunes—just search for ‘Dartmouth Graduate Studies’.

Social media is just one way graduate alumni can stay connected with the graduate community; we are also piloting a new Graduate Externship Program, where graduate students can spend the day with graduate alumni at their place of work. Graduate alumni responded enthusiastically, and over 80 alums signed up to become hosts. Graduate students eagerly signed up and are planning on learning about their career options through our graduate alumni. We are so appreciative of this support!

Graduate alumni continue to support graduate students and their research by donating to the Graduate Alumni Research Award. This year, eleven graduate students received the award and we will be featuring them here on The Graduate Forum. We ask that you consider contributing to graduate student research efforts by going to our website and making a donation.  Remember how important a small amount of funding would have been to you as a graduate student?

Have a wonderful Holiday Season!

Sincerely,

Brian W. Pogue

Dean of Graduate Studies at Dartmouth

During its spring meeting on Friday, June 10, the Dartmouth Board of Trustees elected three new Board members and approved appointments and promotions to faculty positions.

The Board elected James G. Coulter ’82, Gregg L. Engles ’79, and Marye Anne Fox, PhD ’74, as Charter Trustees; they joined the Board, along with two previously elected Alumni Trustees, Gail Koziara Boudreaux ’82 and Bill Burgess ’81, following Commencement on June 12. Coulter is a founding partner of TPG Capital, a private investment firm. Engles is chairman, chief executive officer, and founder of Dean Foods Company. Fox is chancellor of the University of California, San Diego, where she is also a distinguished professor of chemistry

For more information go to Dartmouth Now.

Leah Somerville, a Dartmouth graduate alum, was recently featured in Science Magazine.

Somerville’s co-authored paper, entitled “A Genetic Variant BDNF Polymorphism Alters Extinction Learning in Both Mouse and Human,”  was published by Science in January of 2011.

Somerville received her PhD in Psychological and Brain Sciences from Dartmouth College in 2008, and has since joined the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology as a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University.

Read the full published paper here.

This past fall term, several Arts and Sciences graduate alumni returned to Dartmouth to lead a panel on job searching strategies for current graduate students. Following the discussion, students were able to speak with the panelists informally over lunch.

Moderated by Kerry Landers, Assistant Dean of Graduate Student Affairs, panelists were encouraged to share their experiences tackling the job search as PhDs. The panelists also detailed the various interview processes, salary negotiations, and hiring timelines each experienced in their individual searches.

Panelist Jeremy Ouellette, who received his PhD from Dartmouth in physics and astronomy in 2009, spoke about the decision process involved in choosing between an academic position and a job in the private sector. Currently a systems engineer at Raytheon in the Integrated Defense Systems division, Ouellette briefly considered a job at a private school in Pennsylvania; he accepted the position at Raytheon over a career in academia.

Initially interested in a governmental post-doc position, panelist Brandon Smith attended a conference during his graduate career where he successfully developed a network of contacts in the independent consulting world. Having received his PhD from Dartmouth in chemistry, Smith stressed the importance of both networking and attending academic conferences as a graduate student.

Like Ouellette, panelist Rebecca Lindstrom knew that she wanted to seek a position outside of academia upon completing her PhD in physics and astronomy in 2009. Shortly after starting at M2S in quality assurance, she switched departments and is currently working in data management and software development for clinical trials.

“I really enjoy my work, and it’s something different everyday,” commented Lindstrom.

To learn more about the career resources available to Dartmouth graduate students, contact the Graduate Studies office.

by Erin O’Flaherty

Photograph: Panelists (from left to right) Rebecca Lindstrom, Jeremy Ouellette, and Brandon Smith

Uju Anya

When Obianuju C. Anya (Uju Anya), a UCLA PhD Candidate in Applied Linguistics, first happened upon a bulletin for the Thurgood-Marshall Fellowship at Dartmouth, she knew instantly that she had to apply. Having completed her undergraduate degree at Dartmouth, she felt it was fortuitous to come across this opportunity and that “it be would be poetic to end her academic career at the same place where it began”.

Now a fellow at Dartmouth, Anya is associated with the Program in African and African American Studies (AAAS) and is mentored by Antonio Tillis of AAAS and Rodolfo A. Franconi of Spanish and Portuguese and AAAS.

With her PhD near completion, she’s preparing for the next step in her career while simultaneously wrapping up her dissertation, “Investments in Communities of Learners and Speakers: How African American Portuguese Students Negotiate Ethno-Racialized, Gendered, and Social Classed Identities in Second Language Learning.” She’s also been keeping busy as the Resident Advisor at the Cutter-Shabazz Affinity House.

Read more about Uju’s experience as a Thurgood-Marshall Fellow on the Graduate Studies Website.

by Tennile Sunday
Photo by Tennile Sunday

Alison Mattek

Greetings from the digital musics department! This year has been marked by significant academic accomplishments, as well as cutting-edge, electro-acoustic research. Program Director Michael Casey ’92, presented his research at the Bregman Music and Audio Research Studio at ISMIR in Utrecht, the Stanford University hearing Seminar, Google Research in Mountainview CA, and Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering. He continues to develop both OMRAS2 music information tools, and his own MIR scripting language, pyMARSB. More information is available on his website, www.music.dartmouth.edu/~bmars.

Recently, Technology Director Spencer Topel was the co-curator of the Alternative Events concert at ICMC 2010, which included a performance by the Voxare Quartet. In 2011, Topel’s music will be featured by the MATA Interval Series and in Fresh Ink, a broadcast hosted by the Society for New Music. Joshua Hudelson ’11 is conducting ethnographic research on a community of Americans who use recording and transmission technologies to communicate with the spirits of the dead. He is also developing software tools for tracking, sonifying, and manipulating typing patterns as compositional material.

Alexander Wroten ’11 is developing three video games and plans on examining their intrinsic musicality.

Alexander Dupuis ’12 had his audiovisual improvisation piece “/Ramus /” performed at ICMC 2010 at Stony Brook University, and premiered “/Tree of Aeons /” at the Pixilerations festival in Providence, RI, in October.

David Kant ’12 had a solo show at The Incubator Arts Project in NY, where he also collaborated with composer Yoon Ji Lee at The Stone.

Alison Mattek ’12 recently published her paper, Revisiting Cagean Composition Methodology with a Modern Computational Implementation at NIME 2010 in Sydney, Australia.

The department’s graduate students recently started a band called Gravies and the Main Dish Sauce, and had their inaugural performance in November. Also, the bassoon quintet Dark In the Song premiered “Soon to be Replaced” in Columbia, SC.

Michael Chinen ’09 is in Berlin, working on sonification projects with a group called the Institute for Algorhythmics. The group looks at algorithms, signals, and computer architecture and tries to enunciate the similarities in musical compositions. Visit the group’s website at www.algorhythmics.com/en/ for audio samples. Chinen continues his work on Audacity and FFMpeg, and presented his work at the Google Summer of Code 2010.

Travis Garrison ’06 is pursuing a PhD in Music Composition with a cognate in Historical Musicology from the University of Florida. His compositions were recently performed in France and across the United States at both conferences and festivals including ICMC, SEAMUS, and the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival.

Bruno Ruviaro ’04 is currently working as a doctoral scholar at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Recent compositions include a work for the Stanford Laptop Orchestra, and a trio that performed at the Darmstadt Festival in Germany.

Iroro Orife ’01 is working as a Senior Audio Engineer on Apple’s Final Cut Pro and is running his record label “de’fchild.” For more information, visit the label’s website at http://soundcloud.com/defchild.

Tae Hong Park ’00 recently received tenure at Tulane University, was elected President of ICMA, and is also an editor of SEAMUS.

Colby Leider ’98 was hired as the Director of the Music Engineering Program at the University of Miami. He is currently researching long-term acoustical/meteorological interactions in the Florida everglades.

Ko Umezaki ’93 works in the University of California Irvine’s Music Department in the Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology area. Umezaki produced Huun Huur Tu’s October release of  “Ancestors Call on World Village,” performs with the Silk Road Ensemble, works with the string quartet Brooklyn Rider, and composes with Joe Gramley. Most of his compositions feature Japanese shakuhachi flutes and mobile electronic devices.

Ray Guillette ’92 lives in Berkeley, CA, and is developing an interactive audio-biofeedback environment for the treatment of traumatic-stress conditions.

Alison Mattek

Alison Mattek

by Rebecca Fawcett

Photo: Alison Mattek, a current digital musics graduate student, works in the Bregman Music Audio Research Studio at Dartmouth.

A paper whose co-authors include current Dartmouth researchers Chen (a PhD Biology graduate alum), Folt, and Thomas Hampton, bioinformatics specialist in the Dartmouth Medical School Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, is one of the papers highlighted in conjunction with the publication of “The Ecoresponsive Genome of Daphnia pulex” by CGB Director John Colbourne and his co-authors in Science. The Dartmouth co-authored paper is titled, “Gene Response Profiles for Daphnia pulex Exposed to the Environmental Stressor Cadmium Reveals Novel Crustacean Metallothioneins” and was originally published in BMC Genomics in 2007.

Read the full article in Dartmouth Now.