When I was a graduate student I took a series of classes that were specifically designed for graduate student instructors that were incredibly helpful.  I don’t know how common it is campus-wide to have phd students as the instructor of record for a class, but we have some every semester in industrial engineering.  I know that some of our grad students have gone to a couple of Biggio center workshops but I think that if there is enough demand that it would be incredibly helpful to have a one day workshop for phd student instructors at the end of each semester for the ones that would be teaching for the first time in the upcoming semester.

 

And then for my note about college specific workshops/support/activities: there have been some workshops and discussions that I have participated in where I was one of the only people from engineering and it was very obvious that the experience in my classes is different from others (this is most common in diversity workshops because people in humanities etc have class discussions and content that naturally touches on hard issues about race and gender etc, but we can gloss over all of that in engineering in most cases if we choose to).  It is a great learning experience to know what is the same and different across campus and apply all of that to engineering.  In the workshop this week with just engineering faculty- it was a very different experience because we didn’t have to have any side points in our groups about what kinds of problems we encounter in engineering or the content covered – we all have that same background and got to really dig into field specific criteria and target the things that come up in our discipline with some shared vocabulary and experience.  I think that it might be easier to get more faculty to attend some college specific workshops as a gateway to participating in other Biggio center programs because they would see the immediate application in the first round and then at least have the familiarity with the center and all of you who run it to make/find other chunks of time for the campus wide offerings.

 

That ended up being a little wordier than I was shooting for, but hopefully the thoughts were clear enough.

 

Thanks for inviting me today – I haven’t ever done a focus group like that and it was a very interesting experience.

Have a great afternoon!

erin

Art Museum (LD)

Tech: Qualtrics with Assessment?