As part of the its annual Innovations in Graduate Education program, the UO Graduate School is seeking proposals from graduate programs that want to use innovative, media-based recruitment and retention efforts.
The deadline to submit a proposal is April 6.
Through the Innovations in Graduate Education program, the Graduate School supports the promotion of excellence, innovation and diversity in graduate education. This year, as many as eight awards of up to $2,500 will be made in support of activities that focus on media-based recruitment.
“We are pleased to offer these awards, which will allow departments to create innovative recruiting approaches that will last longer than one recruiting season,” said Andy Berglund, interim dean of the Graduate School.
The Graduate School seeks proposals that address various strategies for recruitment and retention, including webinar series, video production, technology training and more. The Graduate School has partnered with the Center for Media and Educational Technologies to assist departments with developing these practices and tools.
In prior years, the Graduate School’s innovations program funded initiatives that enriched interdisciplinary learning in graduate education as well as professional development initiatives. Past accomplishments of the program include development of an internship-based master’s degree program in biology focused on genomics and bioinformatics, a graduate certificate program in new media and culture, an interdisciplinary graduate training program in environmental studies and graduate specializations in areas such as food studies and neuroscience.
Professional development opportunities included a program that addressed, through roundtable discussions and workshops, training to study and teach race and/or ethnicity across disciplines. The Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management also received funding for a program that introduced doctoral students to nonprofit-sector executive leadership.
Last year, the program funded a series of seminars focusing on non-academic careers, workshops about big data research methods and a web-based career development resource for language teachers.
“The Innovations program gave our Language Teaching Specialization MA program faculty the extra incentive we needed to find time to collaborate on a creative project that would benefit our graduate students,” said Keli Yerian, a faculty member leading one of last year’s winning proposals. “The project has involved students and faculty from linguistics, East Asian languages and literature and romance languages, as well as CMET, the libraries and the Career Center. …We're grateful for the innovations funding that allowed us to both imagine and pursue a project over a period of time with high-quality professional media resources.”
To find out more about this year’s application process, visit the Graduate School website. Questions about the program can be addressed to Cortney McIntyre, admissions and recruitment manager in the Graduate School (cortneym@uoregon.edu).