Area 2. Graduate Programs
Wesleyan has taken the NEASC recommendation to work on identifying and promoting the contributions of its graduate programs to heart.
Identifying the Benefits of Graduate Programs at Wesleyan
First and foremost, Wesleyan’s Graduate Programs provide a high quality, personalized education to our graduate students. Graduate students, however, are by no means the only ones who benefit. Other benefits of our Graduate Programs include:
- Improving the laboratory, research, and music experiences and opportunities for undergraduates
- Providing a critical component in recruiting top faculty in disciplines where graduate students are essential for research success
- Supporting particular areas of research that could not be pursued effectively without graduate student support (e.g., high-tech laboratory science research projects that rely on hands-on lab management and up-to-date expertise)
- Providing undergraduate students interested in research with effective mentoring by Ph.D and masters students, thus leveraging the impact of any single faculty member
- Providing an effective recruiting tool for potential undergraduates: students can benefit from the rare combination of the intimate teaching environment of a small liberal arts college with research opportunities normally found only at larger institutions.
Promoting the Visibility of Graduate Programs at Wesleyan Internally and Externally
Wesleyan has improved the internal visibility of graduate programs by raising the profile of the physical space occupied by the Office of Graduate Student Services and by introducing an interdisciplinary seminar series featuring graduate student speakers. The Office of Graduate Student Services is the collective home for the graduate programs, featuring both a small lounge with coffee and access to the administrative support for graduate students. But it is off the beaten path, in a corner of the Exley Science Center, and it had very poor signage. Since the 2012 reaccreditation, Wesleyan has remodeled the ground floor of Exley, replacing the industrial white paint and hard tile floor with a softer golden color and carpet, and introducing comfortable chairs and tables. As part of this renovation, the signage for the Office of Graduate Student Services was greatly improved, and the renovation now sweeps one towards that office. As a result, the admissions tours can now highlight the graduate programs more, and current students and faculty are reminded of the graduate program.
In 2012 Wesleyan instituted a speaker series (on average two talks a semester) in which graduate students present their work to a wide audience. Attendance over the past two academic years has ranged from 35 to 75, with an average of 51 attendees. These talks have helped to bring the graduate programs greater on-campus visibility as well as bringing the various graduate programs closer together. Both the President and the Provost have attended some of these presentations, the first of which was given by Ph.D. student in Ethnomusicology. Here is a link to an article about a recent graduate speaker series event: http://newsletter.blogs.wesleyan.edu/2017/02/15/graduate-student-hossain-speaks-on-reverse-fault-geometry/.
Wesleyan’s primary link to the larger world is through its websites, and it has enhanced the external visibility of the graduate programs on those websites. The Wesleyan admissions website has undergone a complete overhaul, and the new website points to the BA/MA program — in which Wesleyan students can stay for a fifth year with no tuition and earn an MA degree in one of the science departments — as one of Wesleyan’s distinctive programs. The admissions webpage now also features vignettes about each department, and the ones for the science departments and Music highlight the graduate programs. For example, the Biology page says “Wesleyan University is the only one of its liberal-arts peers with full-fledged Ph. D. programs in the sciences,” and the Earth and Environmental Sciences page says “Unique among schools of comparative size, Wesleyan has small but active graduate programs leading to M. A. and Ph. D. degrees, enhancing the education of undergraduates by providing additional mentoring, more research opportunities, and access to state-of-the-art laboratories.”
The Office of University Communications has made a commitment to feature more articles about the graduate programs in its publicity. There have been about 50 articles about the graduate programs since reaccreditation on the News@Wesleyan blog. To give just two examples: “Ph. D. candidate Obenchain recipient of Humboldt research fellowship” and ‘Ph. D. candidate Blejewski speaks on steel pan and festival culture”. (http://newsletter.blogs.wesleyan.edu/2016/03/11/obenchain/ and http://newsletter.blogs.wesleyan.edu/2016/10/12/steelpanculture/). The communications office has also engaged an outside consultant, Lipman Hearne, to develop a “core messaging” strategy for the University. We are asking the consultant for feedback on additional ways to highlight Wesleyan’s research focus and graduate programs.
Wesleyan also introduced an innovative new graduate degree, the M. A. in Performance Curation, which is run through the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) in the Center for the Arts. ICPP is a low-residency program for professional performance curators. The program awarded its first three masters degrees in May 2016. It is a unique program already highly regarded in the field, having received grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, among others, and as such it has made graduate study at Wesleyan visible in an entirely new realm.
Wesleyan’s Ethnomusicology graduate program is very well-known, and Wesleyan has highlighted it by posting videos of major events. The “Navaratri Festival: Vocal Music of South India” student performance 2008 video is the university’s second most popular YouTube video ever with over 205,000 views (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwdDm3UO5WM).
Wesleyan has also made changes designed to improve the flexibility and effectiveness of the graduate programs that should lead to increased visibility in the future. The University recently increased its support of the BA/MA program by introducing a new food benefit for high-need students in the MA year to ensure that the program is accessible. A new graduate student exit survey for Ph. D. and M. A. graduates was introduced in May 2015. The results of that survey will be used to improve the graduate programs. Due to the small numbers of graduating students, we waited to analyze the results from these surveys in a unified framework until three years of data were accumulated, which occurred in May 2017. For detailed information on the results, see the section on Educational Effectiveness.
Another change was the designation of three graduate student stipends that had previously been allocated solely to the Chemistry department as floating stipends for which any department can apply. When the student given one of these stipends completes his or her eligibility, the stipend returns to the general pool. This controversial change allows the graduate program as a whole to be more responsive to particular situations. So far, the new approach has allowed the growing planetary science program to receive an additional stipend, let an additional stipend be assigned to Physics to support a new faculty member, and enabled a Neuroscience professor housed in Psychology to supervise a Ph.D. student in Biology. The first floating stipends were allocated in Fall 2015, so it is still too early to judge the long-term benefit of this decision. However, this flexibility has already inspired two other professors who would not have thought it possible to have a Ph. D. student before to search, creatively and successfully, for ways to support such a student outside our stipend process.