Accepted, Now What ...

Characteristics of the Student and Experience

Mentoring Excellence

Our department supports graduate student excellence through dedicated faculty, staff and teaching, research spaces, and upper-level students. To benefit from this support network, new students engage in the following general activities, and then increasingly move to greater duties.
• Students will formulate explicit academic goals for their course of study that will both enrich their professional lives and serve to advance the profession.
• Students will maintain a schedule to coordinate courses, meetings, and research to achieve these academic goals.
• Courses will be taken to fill deficiencies and reach learning targets, and research findings will be written and disseminated to reach the broadest audience, often in the form of professional journal manuscripts.
• Meetings and research proceed by both faculty and students committing to a work ethic characterized by good humor, responsibility, accountability, and flexibility.
• Students are expected to dedicate themselves to use appropriate levels of independence, self-sufficiency, rigor, and maintain clear and honest communication.
• Mechanisms for optimizing the faculty to student mentoring involve identifying key tasks and dates, maintaining regular work schedules, enrolling in synthesis or thesis credits, and participating in campus based research seminars and symposium to develop professional growth.

Our past experience shows that the above characteristics are essential for students to reach their learning goals and to provide invaluable service to society and nature.