The town hall meeting occurred on Jan 9 as planned. An outline of the content of my presentation follows:
Job Definitions
- list of director and 2 associate directors of the Sibley School and their functions
- list of DGSs of the three fields of TAM, AE, and ME and their functions
- my roles in the Sibley School (Associate Director for Graduate Studies) and Mechanical Engineering Field (DGS)
My three goals as Assoc Director
- foster intellectual community among students and faculty
- use community to enhance professional development of students
- increase recruiting, retention, and marketing of students
Goals for generating intellectual community
- associate social events with academic events
- build community around Q/A/B exams
- create shared buy-in for MAE colloquium
- create shared buy-in for SIGMA professional development (seminar series, etc)
Recruiting, retention, marketing
- broad marketing/recruiting: I am implementing a protocol such that all papers, grants, exams, graduations are listed on web site
- “modern” approaches to recruiting
- I am working to increase our use of social networks for recruiting and as part of the admit weekend
- I am starting (in fall 2013) targeted recruiting of UG students
- role of community
- community helps recruit, helps retain students
- marketing externally helps recruiting, but the same marketing leads internally to community
Q&A
We had a bunch of Q&A; I will make no attempt to summarize it all. A couple of key takeaways:
Stuff I said or we talked about
- My stress is on protocols as much as possible — I am looking for processes that lead to the outcomes I want. If these work they give a path forward beyond my tenure as Associate Director
- some mention of how I will do targeted recruiting
- some discussion of the MAE colloquium and strategies for its success
- some discussion of things students would like to be more informed about
Questions I couldn’t answer:
* Will the student participation in the 2012 search be codified in departmental protocol.
Areas of concern:
* there is perception among some students that TA loads for some classes are systematically higher than stated hour ranges (15-20 hrs). I will be following up on this. Marcia, it seems, was already following up on this, and we will coordinate.
UPDATE 21 Jan 2013: I have been in discussions with other dept faculty to decide how to proceed re TA hours. No final decision yet but probably one forthcoming in next week.
UPDATE 12 Jan 2013: Talked with other chair – participation is expected there also, details not yet decided.
UPDATE 11 Jan 2013: I have talked with one of the chairs; student participation is expected, not at this (triage) point but later once the field is narrowed down. This is similar to the point at which students actively participated last year