Graduate Ally Coalition.

Abigail Boggs

When asked what would make their experience as graduate students more fulfilling, many students bemoan the isolation of graduate student life. As a group, graduate students tend to be driven individuals whose goal at UCD is quite clear – the successful completion of their graduate degree. This means that students are often far more likely to turn inwards instead of taking advantage of the wide range of resources and opportunities available on campus. While this may seem to simply be the status quo, it can also produce or exacerbate distressing situations, particularly for students from social groups that have not historically been reflected in the culture of the U.S. academy.

As a Professors for the Future fellow, I will collaborate with a wide range of campus organizations, including the Women’s Resource and Research Center, the Cross Cultural Center, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center, Services for International Students and Scholars, and the Campus Violence Prevention Program, to institutionalize a yearly training program for members of the graduate student community to serve as allies for their peers. Through a series of trainings and conversations, graduate allies will gain the skills and knowledge necessary to support students and groups who may experience oppression or harassment due to race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, ability, age, language, nationality, socioeconomic status, and/or religion/spirituality. Graduate allies will develop strategies for helping students cope with difficult situations and will be able to direct students to resources available on campus.

Scientific Leadership and Management.

Hiutung Chu

Scientists have devoted years of training to become well-educated and well-trained researchers, yet few have had the opportunity to develop scientific leadership and management skills. Because effective leadership and management abilities are necessary to effectively run a laboratory, it is essential for graduate students and post-doctoral researchers to obtain the knowledge and insight to successfully operate a lab.
Therefore, graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and junior faculty are invited to participate in a workshop series aimed to serve as a practical guide on starting and managing a research lab. The following topics will be addressed:

1. Leadership and Management Style
2. Managing Communication and Conflict
3. Mentoring in the Laboratory

Speakers will include junior faculty who can share recent experiences, as well as more senior faculty who have successfully navigated through the system and can speak on past experiences and lessons learned.
The goal of the workshop is to expose and address the challenges that a junior investigator will face and to provide the necessary leadership skill sets to direct a successful, productive and dynamic laboratory.

Increasing the ‘Translational’ Potential of Science & Engineering Graduate Research: Opportunities for Cross-Disciplinary Training and Collaboration at UCD.

Collin Ellis

This all day cross-disciplinary workshop will include a collaborative poster session and a sequence of seminars focusing on the various opportunities for new, and will also be open to continuing, graduate students and postdoctoral scholars to increase the ‘translational’
potential of their research by exposing them to cross-disciplinary training opportunities programs at UCD. As a ‘side-effect’, clinically and technologically-driven affiliates would in turn likely find ways to revert their research back to basic scientists and engineers to solidify their work (i.e., the benchtop-to-bedside model is a two-way street). Directors and representatives from programs dedicated to this type of mission will give talks related to their program and pass out information.  

Teaching Evaluations – Assessing the Value and Utility of Student Evaluations.

Mara Evans

Every teaching experience at UC Davis culminates with a key event: teaching evaluations. The data from these evaluations serve as evidence of a graduate student’s teaching ability, and as guides to improve future teaching. Yet, many graduate students ask themselves: How do I use my student evaluations in a constructive manner to improve my teaching?

As a Professors for the Future Fellow I propose to address this problem by (1) assessing how teaching evaluations differ across departments, (2) determine how graduate students use their teaching evaluations and (3) determine the efficacy of using electronic teaching evaluations versus paper evaluations. My goal is to use graduate student and teaching assistant coordinator interviews, in combination with an analysis of the education literature, to assess how the content (e.g. quality of questions) and administration (e.g. frequency and method) of evaluations increases the informative value of students’ answers. Specifically, do students presented with multiple evaluations during a quarter provide more valuable feedback? And would electronic, rather than paper, evaluations provide more insightful responses?

Needs Assessment and Recommended Actions on Behalf of Commuting Graduate Students at UC Davis.

Trina Filan

Graduate students are susceptible to depression and constant questioning of purpose. Staying in school and successfully completing one’s program of study already is challenging. Commuting may add another dimension to the tensions graduate students deal with on a regular basis. To elucidate the impacts of commuting on the lives, experiences of graduate school, and satisfaction of graduate and postdoctoral students at UC Davis, several focus groups and electronic surveys will be conducted.

To uncover and understand the ways commuting affects the lives of graduate and postdoctoral students at UC Davis, my project will involve a series of focus groups and surveys. The former will zero in on topics of greatest importance to commuting students and allow those students to more deeply share their experiences as commuters. The latter will broadly reach commuting graduate and postdoctoral students across campus in order to get a statistical sampling of commuters’ concerns, strategies for success, and suggestions for improvements the university might invest in. Both focus groups and surveys will cover a range of topics, including demographics and time and distance to commute; programmatic and professional development choices and compromises that must be made; methods used to stay connected to cohorts and peer/professional groups; resources they most benefit from while off-campus and resources that might make their lives easier; difficulties with programs, advisers, and on-campus resource access. I also am considering a survey of professor and program/department attitudes regarding commuter students, as well as a review of existing on-campus resources and ways they might be leveraged more effectively.

The goal of the project, simply put, is to improve the lives and experiences of current and future commuting graduate and postdoctoral students at UC Davis.

Funding Yourself: Grant Writing in the Humanities.

Darcy Irvin

All graduate students need to know how to apply for grants. Humanities graduate students, however, generally find themselves competing repeatedly for the same departmental grants every year or being daunted by the idea of applying for one of the coveted $30,000 Woodrow Wilson Indiana Teaching Fellowships. For scholars in the Humanities, it often seems like there isn’t much middle ground. This two-part project is designed to assist Humanities graduate students in applying successfully for smaller amounts of external grant money. The first part of the project consists of a SmartSite (Humanities Grant Writing) containing a number of resources devoted to grant writing in the Humanities. The SmartSite provides information on how to locate funding opportunities; examples of successful grant applications from rough draft to finished form; revision worksheets; reviews of grant-writing handbooks; and a forum where graduate students can meet one another and create workshop groups. The SmartSite resources will be available at any time and will be updated throughout the year. The second portion of the project will be a writing seminar that takes place during Winter and Spring quarters. This seminar will offer graduate students a chance to work through an entire grant application, from start to finish, with a supportive writing group. Throughout the three meetings, graduate students will locate small external grants, create writing groups to generate focused feedback on their writing, and produce finished drafts of their grant proposals. By the end of the seminar, every participant will have a completed grant proposal that is ready to be sent off.

Translating Research into Practice: Developing Media, Policy, and Outreach Skills.

Terra Kelly (with Elizabeth VanWormer)

While we often communicate within our specific disciplines and the larger university environment, many graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and faculty search for ways to share their research outside of academia in order to promote public action and policy change.  Traditional academic training develops strong discipline relevant skills, but rarely provides experience in interfacing with the media, policy makers, and local communities.

We will develop and lead a one quarter seminar course (two credit, S/U grading scale) that will offer opportunities to gain insight into and practical experience in media relations, public policy development, and outreach.  This course will be supported by the John Muir Institute and its Environmental Leadership Program.  The seminar sessions will be facilitated by invited persons with expertise in these areas including professionals from the university communications service, policymakers, local outreach groups, and faculty that integrate research translation into their programs. In the interactive and informal course setting, participants will have the chance to practice the skills that will prepare them for communicating their research within and beyond academia.

To evaluate the success of this course, we will request that attendees complete an evaluation on the utility of the sessions and offer suggestions for improvement. Creating a quarter based seminar framework, establishing connections with diverse instructors, and allowing students to gain credit for participation will build a sustainable foundation for integrated media, policy and outreach training experiences to continue in the future on the UCD campus.

Graduate Teaching Community.

Cassandra Paul

Graduate students at UC Davis have many roles.  They can be learners, researchers, and educators all at the same time.  While there are considerable efforts in place to encourage graduate students to become exceptional learners and researchers, there are almost none in place to motivate good teaching practices.  Because of this many graduate students around campus feel unsupported and isolated in their pursuit to become better educators. 
The Graduate Teaching Community seeks to change the current stigma that teaching be inarguably tertiary to graduate students’ other two roles.  We will meet weekly to discuss current and relevant teaching issues across disciplines.  Each community member will have the option to facilitate a meeting where they will have ownership over the content and the format.  The goals of this community are to provide support, encouragement, and opportunity to those who feel inspired to go beyond the basic professional development required by the University.  Specifically we seek to accomplish the following:

1. Establish an interdisciplinary community supportive of teaching and learning.
2. Provide a venue for graduate students to creatively explore their teaching interests. (Practice your practice!)
3. Create a means for graduate students to become more educated about current research and events in education.
4. Help graduate students develop successful teaching reflection practices.

If you are a graduate student or post-doc interested in teaching, you belong in the Graduate Teaching Community.  Please email capaul@ucdavis.edu to be placed on the mailing list, or visit: http://trc.ucdavis.edu/?p=1107 for more details.

Show Me Your Data! Designing Sophisticated Charts and Graphics for Your Audience.

Rene' Rosenbaum

Nowadays data is generated or collected in nearly all research fields. However, raw numbers are difficult to interpret especially if coming in large volumes. To simplify this process, visual representations such as charts or diagrams are widely applied. Although it is well known that “a picture is worth a thousand words”, there are many different ways to view the data.
This project is about teaching and practicing the fundamentals of data visualization. Even if appropriate visualization depends on many factors, there are some basic design principles that must be followed in order to allow for expressive results. The goal of this project is to provide the audience with the expertise needed in order to create more significant representations of their data. The required fundamentals and skills will be taught by a little lecture series and trained by associated seminars involving real-life data from the attendees. A visit to the KeckCAVES Virtual Reality environment allows participants to gain further insight into other interesting facets of visualization.

Broader Impacts 101: Strategies for Integrating Your Research with Educational Outreach.

Jacob Setterbo

It is often difficult for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars to address the “broader impacts” on society criterion that is common to many grant applications (particularly NSF grants).  This criterion requests that research is effectively integrated with education, is communicated broadly to a large audience, encourages diversity in science and research, enhances scientific and technical understanding, and benefits society.  Not only is it unclear how exactly to address this criterion, but research projects are often very specific and not easily distributed to a broad audience.  Graduate students need guidance on how to effectively address this criterion when writing grant proposals.  Additionally, graduate students need help in developing and/or finding existing education and public outreach activities that will help them achieve broader impacts. 

In order to help graduate students address the broader impacts criterion, I will run a workshop which focuses on integrating research with educational outreach.  After this workshop I hope to organize a network or workgroup of students to help them actively participate in education and public outreach projects.  I also plan on further developing the web-based resource which details the resources and opportunities for communicating their research to a broader audience.

Translating Research into Practice: Developing Media, Policy, and Outreach Skills.

Elizabeth VanWormer (with Terra Kelly)

While we often communicate within our specific disciplines and the larger university environment, many graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and faculty search for ways to share their research outside of academia in order to promote public action and policy change.  Traditional academic training develops strong discipline relevant skills, but rarely provides experience in interfacing with the media, policy makers, and local communities.

We will develop and lead a one quarter seminar course (two credit, S/U grading scale) that will offer opportunities to gain insight into and practical experience in media relations, public policy development, and outreach.  This course will be supported by the John Muir Institute and its Environmental Leadership Program.  The seminar sessions will be facilitated by invited persons with expertise in these areas including professionals from the university communications service, policymakers, local outreach groups, and faculty that integrate research translation into their programs. In the interactive and informal course setting, participants will have the chance to practice the skills that will prepare them for communicating their research within and beyond academia.

To evaluate the success of this course, we will request that attendees complete an evaluation on the utility of the sessions and offer suggestions for improvement. Creating a quarter based seminar framework, establishing connections with diverse instructors, and allowing students to gain credit for participation will build a sustainable foundation for integrated media, policy and outreach training experiences to continue in the future on the UCD campus.

Growing an Open-Source Research Community: GameWeb at UC Davis.

Tim Waring

At some point, most graduate students and post-doctoral scholars ask the question “Hasn’t someone already solved this problem?” The answer is usually yes.

My project seeks to save students (mostly in the social sciences) from having to reinvent research methods – by distributing a concrete research tool and by instigating collaboration between graduate students, post-docs and departments to help them use it. The tool is a flexible, open-source software system for mobile web-based data collection called GameWeb. Developed at UC Davis to administer economic experiments or ‘games,’ GameWeb streamlines data collection either in a computer lab or in the field, for social research from experimental games to surveys and simple data entry.

First I will seek out graduate students, post-docs and departments who might benefit from GameWeb, and demonstrate it's capabilities for them. Next I will solicit feature requests from those who are interested in putting GameWeb to use in their research. Finally I will work to coordinate potential users to find the means to develop GameWeb into an even more valuable, powerful and flexible research tool.

Rendered Science Graphics: An Introductory Applied Art Project.

Tiffany Zink

As one of the nation’s eminent public research universities, UC Davis (UCD) is active in developing lifelong learning in the next generation of aspiring scientists. Science is an integral component in the core curriculums of respective programs offered to prospective students. Publications represent one expression of a student’s successful scientific endeavors. However, first time authors’ typically find navigating through the process of writing a peer-reviewed research paper a formidable task. UCD has already made commendable efforts to address this issue by offering short survey courses through the Teaching Resource Center (TRC). Figure preparation is one under represented TRC topic not currently offered. Via a series of six seminars, I plan to assist students in the production of a scientific based artwork graphic or illustration. The series will cover topics such as an introduction to artwork software, individual figure instructions, clarity in figure caption composition, and an emphasis on accuracy. It will be the student’s option to enter their artwork into a nationally recognized competition upon completion. The project’s aim is to encourage UCD students to extend an appreciation for the beauty of nature as expressed within the context of science and technology and simultaneously provide students with a translational skill set, which can then later be applied to journal figure preparation.