|
 When Boyd Cothran, Drew Thompson, and Liz Zanoni came from opposite ends of the country to scout out graduate school in Minnesota, they had history programs at big-name universities at the top of their lists.
Then they dropped in on the Graduate Workshop in Modern History, meeting on the west bank of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. There they saw and heard other graduate students--not just in history but in fields from English to education--presenting their research. Faculty members attended and participated, but the leadership came from graduate students, who were obviously thriving on each others' feedback and ideas.
All three packed their bags for Minnesota.
"One of the things that brought me was the rigorous and collegial graduate community," says Cothran. "One week, the topic might be industrialization in China, and the next week, the colonial experience in Montana. To me, the workshop is the backbone of the U's history graduate program."
Zanoni--who studies migration and gender--is now a co-leader of the workshop with Drew Thompson, who studies African Americans' connections with contemporary Africa.
Cothran found a key faculty member for his dissertation committee when the workshop brought them together. He was also invited to organize a graduate workshop for the Department of American Indian Studies--which doesn't have a free-standing graduate program, yet is a nexus for graduate students across the campus whose research has a base in American Indian studies.
The energy of the history workshop, which began in 2005, has ebbed and flowed with the students who participate. But it's an example of the interdisciplinary strength of the University of Minnesota and a sign of how the graduate student experience is changing. Once known for narrowing students' interests and producing overly specialized Ph.D.s, graduate education is gaining new vitality from revision and reform, and the University of Minnesota is at the leading edge.
Better practices
It's a troubling statistic: nationwide, only about half those who set out to get a doctorate actually complete it. And in some fields, even the best and brightest struggle or languish for more than a decade to finish. In most fields, the University of Minnesota has been no different than national norms in this regard. But it has made a commitment to improvement as an active participant in national efforts to increase completion rates and reduce time to degree.
"One of the Graduate School's guiding goals is more joy," says dean Gail Dubrow. "To create an outstanding student experience, one of our roles is to find best practices in specific departments and get others to adopt them--extending them around in a way that ultimately lifts up the University as a whole."
The Department of History is a case in point. Since 2001, it has identified and adopted key changes that have succeeded in shortening its doctoral students' time to degree by about two years--from between 8.5 and 10 years (2000-02 graduates) to 6.5 and 8 years (2005-07 graduates). The rate of students who reach ABD status--all but dissertation--within three years has risen from about 25 to 90 percent. Changes include full funding for all admitted students through degree completion, reforming parts of the curriculum, and encouraging graduate student writing and publication through groups like the workshops. The Graduate School has relied on this and other departments' experience as a testing ground for reform and as a resource for other programs contemplating change.
 Best practices may come from entirely different areas of scholarship. Rotations, for example, are a standard part of laboratory training in the health sciences, where students like Katie Schiller get a chance to explore a range of research areas led by several faculty experts before selecting a longer-term lab placement.
"You get to try a lot of different things," says Schiller, a doctoral student in comparative and molecular biosciences, who discovered her drive and talent for cystic fibrosis research during rotations. "Research on treating these diseases requires a lot of collaboration."
Rotations also give faculty members exposure to gifted graduate students who have not yet found the perfect match between current research under way and their own skills, personalities, and intellectual passions. This practice can allow the University to retain talent and more fully realize the potential of graduate students as well as the potential of the faculty.
Dubrow envisions the lab rotation concept as a best practice to expand beyond the bench sciences to other fields, including the social sciences and even the humanities, where exposure to various faculty, research methods, and subjects may expand student horizons.
Stronger communities
Another strength at the University of Minnesota is the increasing diversity of students. In 2008, the Graduate School's student body of more than 10,000 came from all 50 states and 143 nations, with nearly equal numbers of men and women. About 25 percent are international and 10 percent U.S. minorities.
That diversity was attractive to Schiller, who appreciates the range of ages and cultures in the labs where she's worked through her rotations. More than 75 percent of her peers in the lab are women and half are international.
"There is no typical grad student," she says. "It's a fun work environment. Visitors notice that this is unusual."
Increasing the number of students from underrepresented U.S. groups remains a work in progress, especially as the entire U.S. population becomes more diverse. Too often, individual students from backgrounds long underrepresented in academic life can't find the community they need. A sense of community with others from similar backgrounds has been identified as a critical factor in graduate student retention and graduation.
 No one knows this better than Patricia Jones Whyte, director of the Graduate School's Diversity Office.
"The University of Minnesota is a big place," says Jones Whyte. "That's a good thing, but a person can get lost and lose courage. It can be difficult to find somebody who has faced the same kinds of challenges you have with your particular ethnic background, a disability, or age--those are just a few examples."
The Community of Scholars Program was created in 1999 to fill the gap for students of color. In the summer before students enroll for the first time, the program brings fellowship recipients together for research with a faculty mentor, networking, and workshops. Before their first year is over, they also mentor and tutor community youth.
"The Community of Scholars has made a tremendous impact in my graduate experience," says Teresa Obrero, a first-generation college student who came to the University for master's degrees in public policy and social work. "I've made friends from across disciplines and formed my community. The program provides a space for students of color to widen their networks and learn from one another."
Ideas developed and tested in the Diversity Office--such as a personal approach to recruiting and sustained dissertation-writing workshops--have resulted in measurable improvements, going against local and national trends. The Community of Scholars Program has been so successful that, beginning in 2005, components such as writing support groups were extended to all graduate students as a best practice.
More support
Funding packages play a key role and remain a daunting challenge--despite dramatic increases in the University's investment in graduate fellowships over the past four years. When it comes to recruiting the world's best students, the University of Minnesota is competing ever more fiercely with top public and private institutions supported by major endowments and unprecedented investment. Many peers and competitors for graduate students now offer five years of support to all admitted doctoral students, a goal that eludes many programs at Minnesota.
Graduate students are commonly supported by a combination of assistantships funded by their departments and by fellowships from the Graduate School and other sources. The University has doubled its support for Graduate School fellowships since 2004. Yet, for the class entering in fall 2008, the Graduate School was able to make multiyear offers to only a fraction of the entering class.
"Even in the speediest programs, graduate school is a multiyear endeavor," says Dubrow. "Multiyear packages provide some measure of predictability for today's top talent."
The cost of graduate education is a major challenge, not only for individuals but for adults supporting families. Those trading the security of a full-time job for the long-term benefits of an advanced degree benefit from greater certainty up front about the level and duration of financial support they can anticipate before embarking on the journey to the Ph.D.
The Graduate School promotes a combination of fellowships and research and teaching assistantships that encourage steady progress while gaining skills valuable in the job market--a combination that has proven successful for the Department of History.
Cothran, for one, is on track to finish his Ph.D. in what many consider lightning speed for the humanities and social sciences. A little more than two years after arriving in Minnesota, he'll be ABD--all but dissertation--in December.
"The quality of the graduate community here was the key, but I couldn't even look at programs without full funding," he says. "And the funding made a big difference in how fast I could go."
Speeding up Ph.D.s' time to degree
In 2005, the University of Minnesota became part of the national Ph.D. Completion Project, an in-depth multiyear study of doctoral education led by the Council of Graduate Schools. The project aims to produce comprehensive data on attrition from doctoral study and completion and to develop best practices. Fourteen U of M graduate programs contribute data and are now beginning to implement best practices.
The Graduate Writing Initiative is a best practice identified right here. It grew out of dissertation-writing workshops developed for students of color by the Graduate School Diversity Office. Workshop leaders knew they were on to something when participants began asking permission to bring their friends. Then the participants began to show higher and faster completion rates than their peers. The workshops were so successful that they served as a model to extend support to all graduate students who need it. The initiative connects University offices and units that already support graduate students' writing. It provides a dissertation calculator, workshops, support groups, and a sense of community. |
This feature first appeared in the 2008-09 issue of Discovery, published annually by the Graduate School for alumni and friends.
|
