Program Assessment

I am proud of being one member in this learning community. Not only because we have active and well-known faculty members in our field, but also because people support and respect each other. Especially, doctoral students are treated as colleagues and are seen as friends to the faculty members. Additionally, our department does a good job of providing financial support for doctoral students, which is very important for international students like me. In addition, we have a low ratio of doctoral students to faculty members, which means that doctoral students have more opportunities to either work or do research with faculty members. This greatly improves the probability of a high-quality learning experience in the program. In this part of my portfolio, I provide feedback as well as some suggestions for our program and categorize them into three sections.

Department resources

Expert for the weird design of the Aderhold Hall building such as a lot of small rooms without windows, I think our department provides me a comfortable environment to work on my research. I like my little space and like to discuss my ideas with other doctoral students whose offices are nearby. As to the research opportunities, I think both faculty members and other doctoral students are my potential research partners. I realize that the best research model in our program is to initiate a research idea by myself and then find other people to support my idea. It is great to be involved in ongoing funded projects like the LPSL has, but not everyone can get in and somehow the project itself will refine or limit personal research interests. I like the example of the “FIPSE-CAPES exchange program” that Tel Amiel, Jo McClendon, and Dr. Orey bring to us. Finding the grant to support our research ideas is a win-win situation for both individuals and our department. Although unfortunately we cancelled a doctoral seminar class related to grant writing this semester, I think we can still have a series of workshops to discuss grant searching and proposal writing. For me, most of my professional development has happened outside my coursework. It is all about self-learning, and workshops as well as seminars are good ways to scaffold my professional development. Another idea is that we can combine our department's resources to build or maintain beneficial relationships with other schools or departments. Our Masters program already promotes public service to local communities, but this can be extended to support better research. For example, the Masters students fulfilling their service requirements can provide services (e.g., building class web pages) in a local elementary school where our colleagues actually conduct research. This is a win-win situation because our students complete their requirements while our department builds or maintains better research relationships with other departments and local schools.

Program design

The doctoral seminar class is a good design to help first and second year doctoral students to know each other and build a sense of learning community. Additionally, the doctoral seminar class actually shows us how to become a successful doctoral student as well as a good researcher in our field. The invited lecturers always provided me some ideas for professional development. I like the seminar class and think it is an important class for doctoral students. On the other hand, the mentor design, which is actually embedded in this doctoral seminar, does not function very well in my case. Our relationship is only within the class and for the assignment. I believe the main reason for this is that we do not have similar research interests. My mentor undoubtedly can provide me some advice, but actually most of time when I have questions I will ask as many people as I can, especially the third- or forth-year doctoral students. Nevertheless, I still think that the mentor design is good, but the way to form it can be changed a little bit. My suggestion is to ask the first year doctoral student to look at second year doctoral students’ first year review web pages, and let them decide who they want to be their mentor. It is like asking the first year students to hire the second year student as their mentors, but I think this way will make this relationship more meaningful. In addition, I think combining two or three mentor pairs to form tablemates is also a good strategy to improve the mentor relationship. Another idea is to ask each mentor pair to submit a research proposal to a conference, but this might be too much for most of our doctoral students. It’s just a thought.

IT community

From the doctoral student retreat to the fund-raising for the microwave in the kitchen, I can realize that our department does a good job of building the sense of IT community. As I know more about my colleagues, I start to enjoy being a member of this community. I have two suggestions and one question in this section. One suggestion is that we can have a bulletin board in the kitchen. Sometimes I found it is a good place to meet people and chat about the affairs or news in our department. Another suggestion is to have the doctoral students’ individual photos on the bulletin board outside the elevators. I found that several departments have done this, and I think it has helped to give “outsiders” a sense that those departments are true communities. The one question I have is that I heard that our department has some committees to deal with things like technology or the doctoral program, and each committee has a faculty member and a student representative to take care of it. My question is: Does this design still function? How is one selected for these committees? If this structure is still functioning, maybe it can combine with ITSA, and create more officers' positions. This could make more people involved in ITSA, and also enrich students’ vitas.

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