Graduate Council Advisory Committee
HUC 325
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Members present: Burton Patterson, Melissa Galvin, Jim Collawn, Kyle Grimes, Bryan Noe, Susan Rich, Jeff Engler, Stephen O’Connor, Erica Pryor, Mary MacDougall, Rosalyn Weller
Staff: Thomas Harris, Susan Banks
Guest: Dr. Yogesh Vohra
- Dr. Noe opened meeting by introducing Dr. Yogesh Vohra who had been invited to the meeting to discuss the Proposal for an Applied Physics track.
- Dr. Vohra discussed comparison data over the last ten years which show that 50% Physics PhD graduates have gone into Applied Physics careers. For students who receive their degree in Applied Physics, there is a more than 50% chance that their first position will become permanent. In the past year, 2007, the Physics department received an NIH training grant in Nanotechnology that has funding to send students for internships. The purpose of the proposal is to start a track in Applied Physics within the Physic graduate programs which will have 14 credit hours of core course which are common to the traditional Physics PhD; students will have an opportunity to take 12 credit hours of interdisciplinary courses which are offered throughout the campus and 3 semester hours for the internship which will be paid by the internship site. The new track will help grow the program from thirty students now to fifty students over the next five years. Students will do the internship after they have passed their comprehensive exams at the end of their third year. Students will perform internships at extramural sites where there will be space to take up to five students a year. There is a growing trend across the country in Applied Physics and Nanotechnology specializations. The focus of the proposed track at UAB is to expand on UAB research strengths in Nanotechnology and Laser Methodology. The program will begin with a class of five students which will not affect the enrollment of traditional Physics PhD program. The new program track can run parallel to, and not compete with, other PhD programs (e.g. Materials Engineering) by offering the 12 credit hours outside the Physics program. The PhD for student in the Applied track will be granted in Physics. Marketing for the new track will come from making additional courses available and students will receive certification from their internship site. ADCOM members voted to approve the proposal.
- The second agenda item, “Advertising graduate student thesis and dissertation defenses”, resulted from a query by a concerned mentor who didn’t think the University was doing an adequate job of advertising student thesis and dissertation defenses. Previously the defense dates were published in the UAB Reporter but that has now stopped. The ways in which the dates are advertised now are postings to the Graduate School website calendar of events which is not the best place for advertisement. ADCOM was asked for suggestions of ways in which these defense dates can be advertised more openly. It was indicated that the electronic version of the Reporter does have a link to defense dates near the end of the publication but the link doesn’t appear to be obvious to many people. Other suggestions included continued advertising by posting flyers around campus, advertisement on a general calendar linked from the main UAB home page, requiring students to attend as part of their regular program seminar series, create a BlazerNet channel and lastly to change the form on the GS website and have it link directly to the calendar to insure each student’s defense date is posted. The ADCOM committee agreed that the primary responsibility to advertise defense dates will rest at the program level. The other options will be investigated.
- Agenda item three was discussion of whether having a Faculty Senate representative attend ADCOM meetings would be appropriate. Over the last year there has been concern within the Faculty Senate that policy making units should have a Faculty Senate representative present who could then report back to the Senate about the deliberations of the policy making units. The Faculty Senate representative would attend as an ex-officio member and will not take part in voting. ADCOM members were not against having a representative present but suggested other means for the Faculty Senate to obtain the information needed without having to send a representative to attend ADCOM meetings. Suggestions are as follows: create a link from the Faculty Senate website directly to the minutes from the ADCOM meetings, continue to post minutes to the Graduate School website as well as attachments for everyone’s use, if a Faculty Senate member wants to attend an ADCOM meeting to bring forward specific issues for discussion he/she could be placed on the agenda, any and all Faculty Senate members are invited to attend the Graduate Council meetings to obtain updates on Graduate School activities, Dean Noe can meet with the Faculty Senate to address questions they might have regarding the Graduate School, and lastly the ADCOM is already comprised of a representative from each school. This is perceived to be appropriate representation and Faculty Senate members, or any faculty member if they wish, can bring issue to, or discuss Graduate School policies with their school’s ADCOM representative.
- Item four on the agenda dealt with the Graduate fellowship application process. Questions came up with regard to the committee that developed the process for NS&M, SBS, ENG and EDU. There was a concern that some of the data provided by the Graduate School was inaccurate and the question was how can the incorrect data be corrected? Coding in Banner was cited as a partial explanation for some inaccuracies; this problem should be corrected by mid 2009. For this year, the recommendation to the program directors is to correct any of the inaccurate information for their program and to cite the inaccuracies specifically so that the source of the errors can be corrected for the future.
- Agenda item five was a discussion of the approval process for students who teach at other colleges. A student from UAB was offered an opportunity to teach for a semester at Birmingham Southern and would be compensated for the teaching over and beyond her stipend. The student had approval from her program director and advisor, but the program director was concerned about the compensation piece because it set up a dichotomy between the rest of the students in the program and the student. The level of additional compensation proposed would bring the student’s annual compensation to a level that slightly exceeds the $27K limit. The question put forth to ADCOM was should the compensation be considered an addition to the student’s stipend, or as compensation from a different source? Lauretta Gerrity in the VP for Research Office suggested that the situation be treated the same way in which faculty consulting is considered. The teaching should be considered part of the student’s training that is in line with the aspirational goals of the student. ADCOM members agreed to create a formal policy to allow students to consult. Approval will have to come from the student’s advisor, his/her program director or department Chair and the Graduate School Dean. There will be no time limit set for how long the student can teach. An internal timeline should be set within each program. Documentation of the approvals will be kept within the student’s department or program. Formal guidelines will be published by the Graduate School.
- For the final agenda item, Dr. Noe gave an overview of the 2007-2008 academic year. Dr. Noe reviewed the materials that were prepared for his annual Planning Session with the Provost and Presidents to set goals for the year and the report on the progress toward meeting those goals. The scorecard for the Graduate School was the first topic of discussion. The first item on the scorecard is enrollment. The President and Provost also wanted to know what the application pool and matriculation numbers were going back 3 years. These data can be accessed in a attachment. {Click here to see attachments which provide data on Graduate School enrollment, application pool size and matriculants.} In all semesters since 2005, the numbers incremented annually for applications, matirculants, and total enrollment. The fall 2008 total enrollment exceeds the previous scorecard goals for 2008. The percentage change in total enrollment between fall 2005 fall 2008 enrollment is almost 20%. The percentage change between fall 2007 and 2008 alone is 8%. Undergraduate enrollment was down by three hundred. The minority enrollment has been stable for the last five years at between 19 – 20%; this falls slightly below the prescribed scorecard goal. One deficiency which affects minority enrollments is the lack of significant resources to provide diversity fellowships. The graduate school will begin to track the total number of minority applicants, those accepting offers and the number of applicants to whom UAB made offers of admission who matriculate at other schools. Last January Dr. Engler submitted a grant to NIGMS aimed at minority, low income students who decide they might wish to pursue a graduate degree in the biomedical sciences. The grant allows those students to receive up to two years of training in the lab, GRE prep courses and mentoring that will help these students to become more competitive for entry into Graduate School programs. The scholarship and fellowship support is the third item among the scorecard goals. Although the total falls somewhat below the projected scorecard goal, the total funding for graduate students exceeds $26 million. Roughly fifty percent of the $26 million comes from grants, twenty percent comes from the graduate school, twenty-eight percent comes from departments to support TAs or RAs and two percent from endowments and gifts. There are twenty eight training grants that fund ninety predocs and seventy postdocs. The GRE scorecard goal for fall 2007 was 522 verbal, and 640 quantitative. The actual scores for PhD program matriculants is 534 verbal, and 659 quantitative. Doctorates awarded for the 2007-2008 year were 192; the scorecard goal was 163.
Additional goals were (1) to develop the GBS office and assist the school of medicine with the transformation of departmentally based programs into interdisciplinary programs. Another goal (2) was to implement a regular process of program review. The NRC report will provide comparative data on the quality of UAB PhD programs. The Graduate School has opted into the Faculty Scholarly Productivity data system that is provided by Academic Analytics. These data will also allow more direct peer comparisons. Also, the entire university has implemented the WEAVE online system which is a tracking system that looks into everything a department will need to prepare for the next accreditation visit. Another goal (3) is to develop a Filemaker Pro database that imports data on students, postdocs and faculty from Banner. In addition to allowing the tracking of student progress, the database is being used to facilitate the preparation of training grant applications. Since October of 2007, the GBS office has assisted in the preparation of 13 training grant applications. If all are funded, positions for 70 predoctoral trainees will be supported. (4) RCR education is being expanded with the Avoiding Plagiarism workshop which is being made available to and program or student group. With funding from the original grant, Dr. Engler has put helped to develop effective videos for use in several different workshops. Dr. Engler has submitted a grant application in response to an RFA from the CGS and ORI for developing more RCR education which can be placed into the curriculum. (5) Since May of 2007 when the program was announced, 76 students have submitted the individual fellowship applications. Of the 51 applications that were submitted more than 6 months ago, 23 have been funded, representing an outstanding 45% capture rate. The 23 new fellowships represent a 209% increase in the number of individual awards that UAB students held when the incentive program was first announced.
The meeting adjourned at 5:45 p.m.