Location: Dartmouth College Hanover, NH November 17–19

Friday

Opening Reception:

Networking opportunity for delegates to get to know each other, discuss their position and responsibilities at their respective institutions.

“The Importance of a Liberal Arts Education”

Opening Remarks from Professor of English Donald Pease:′ Lecture and discussion focused on creating a diversified program that incorporates the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences and the challenges that such a program faces in a graduate program.

Saturday

Panel Discussion on International Student Issues:

Discussion lead by Stephen Silver, Director of the International Office at Dartmouth. The talk focused primarily on issues dealing with visas and travel regulations.

Mentoring

Professor of Biological Sciences Roger Sloboda spoke to the body about effective mentoring practices. Students who are properly mentored tend to be more productive and become better mentors themselves. Creating good mentor/mentee relationship seems to be the focus of Administrations as well as students. This discussion was the central biggest topic of the conference. PowerPoint Slides of presentation. [1]

Recommended Reading: Handlesman, Jo, et al. (2005) “Entering Mentoring: A Seminar to Train a New Generation of Scientists.” Pdf Link [2]

Small Group Discussions:

• Community Service — Coming down from the Ivy Tower. The consensus for the best method to get people involved is to have a community service day open to everyone as an introduction to all the opportunities available.
• Student Governance — Discussion of operations from how strict each group follows procedure (most groups don’t have a strict adherence to parliamentary procedure, only for important and contentious issues). Princeton has each piece of legislation sent to a Pro and a Con ad hoc committee.
• Student Life — Graduate Student Appreciation week seems to work well if it is well publicized and has numerous events. Co-funding between different groups always creates complications.

School Presentations:

• Columbia — communications, online newsletter is not working
• Penn — undergoing major structural governance reorganization
• Princeton — Experimenting with Grads & Undergrads Living together (like Cornell West Campus)
• Brown — Will host summit in 2008
• Dartmouth — Struggling with graduate & professional student identity at a school focused on UG’s
• Harvard — Attempting to get representation in the selection of Harvard’s new president
• Yale — Disseminating information, working to represent many different students

Dinner — Opening Remarks from Dartmouth Graduate Dean Charles Barlow.

Table Discussion focused on student representation in university leadership such as the Board of Trustees

Sunday Breakfast

Wrap-up and suggestions for next year

Overarching Themes

Tying schools together, increased student representation, creating a graduate student identity, reforming existing government structures.

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