Announcing the first meeting of the Graduate Student Mental Health working group

Graduate students from the Department of Sociology, with a little help from The University Graduate School, are forming a working group to address mental health issues amongst our graduate student population at IU. 

FIRST MEETING: 
Monday, March 29, 2010
IMU Dogwood Room, 2pm
Welcome remarks by Dean James Wimbush.
Open to all.

Group members will meet periodically throughout the semester to:

 -  Catalogue current mental health resources that target graduate student needs
 -  Identify limitations and brainstorm solutions/strategies for rectifying these deficiencies
 -  Poll graduate students about what mental health needs are most pressing at IU

We hope you are enthusiastic about improving graduate student mental health at Indiana University and encourage all interested students to respond.

TO JOIN: email iugradschool@gmail.com and we'll send you an invitation to the web site / mailing list.

Feature: The GradGrants Center

The IU GradGrants Center.  Photo by Erika Lee.

Visit the IU GradGrants Center website:  www.indiana.edu/~gradgrnt

When your research projects need funding and you need grant writing advice, who do you call?

If you're an IU grad student, call the GradGrants Center (GGC).  Sponsored by the University Graduate School, the GGC is a free service available to all IU graduate students and is centrally located on the Bloomington campus in the Wells Library, Room E651.

GGC consultants help students find funding and apply for it.  These experienced, successful grant writers consult one-on-one with students to write grant proposals, help with database searches for grants and offer funding workshops for IU graduate departments and organizations. 

"The GradGrants Center provides critique and suggestions at every stage from project formulation to writing to casting an eye over a final draft of a well-crafted proposal," said Kevin Meskill, GGC consultant and anthropology doctoral student.  "We give you the skills and confidence to write your own grants.  It looks daunting, but it just takes practice."

Kevin suggests that graduate students make grant writing and searching a part of their graduate career.  Grant histories, he said, are built by writing small grants, which then help to get bigger grants.  And writing grants allows many students to view their research more broadly. 

"When considering the relevance of your work," Kevin said, "don't forget to mention the intellectual merit and the broader impact of your research.  Dissertation committees don't usually look at that, but it's what brings in funding... Granting agencies are the people at the forefront of their fields, so writing grants helps you to articulate your project with funding interests in mind.  Grants are a great way to look at cutting edge research in your field."

The GGC also provides several databases that only they have access to at IU for finding the best grant for your project.  GGC consultants can run database searches for graduate students, the student can make an appointment, or students can visit the GGC Web Site and run searches on their own.

When the GGC was started in 1989, IU was one of the first universities in the nation to establish a grant writing center for graduate students, but the resources, especially the database access, was not available as easily as it is now.  "All we had was a computer chained to a table in a student lounge on which we ran database searches, and one graduate assistant who ran from the office to the lounge and back.  Over the years, we have added consulting, newsletter, workshops, a Web Site, and one-on-one peer consultation and critiquing.  A lot has changed," Director Jody Smith said.

She attributes some of the GGC success and popularity to the low-risk environment created by a private office and peer-to-peer advice. "Surveys show that the GGC is a non-threatening situation," she said. "Some students come to us even before they go to student peers and faculty to have their proposals read for just that reason."

Graduate students interested in holding a grant writing information session for their department or organization should contact the GGC. "For the brown bag lunches and information sessions, we usually run a general search for that particular discipline to give the students some idea of what is out there for them to apply for," Smith said.

The GGC gets emails from around the world who thank them from their help.  You could be one of them; all you need to do is call.

Located in the Wells Library, Room E651, IUB.
gradgrnt@indiana.edu
855-5281
www.indiana.edu/~gradgrnt

IU Graduate Student Profile: Ivan Furre

IU Graduate Student Ivan Furre.  Photo by Erika Lee.

IU Sociology Graduate Student Ivan Furre is having a busy year.

First of all, he's a graduate student and let's face it - that means busy.  But in the Fall of 2009, Ivan somehow found the time to work with departments around the Bloomington campus to help organize the Fifteenth Annual IU Undergraduate Research Conference (IUURC).

At the IUURC, undergraduate students from all eight IU campuses are given the opportunity to network, present research, and attend workshops on how to get into the best graduate programs around the country.  Ivan worked closely with Dean Yolanda Treviño from the University Graduate School to oversee logistics, arrange the venue, recruit volunteers and judges, and even managed to engage in fund raising. This enabled Indiana University to give cash awards to the top-ranked undergraduate research projects. Running a conference may be a series of small details and tasks, but it is not a small undertaking, especially when trying to complete your own degree.

This spring, Ivan has shifted his efforts to teaching graduate students as a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Mannheim in Germany. He is teaching masters students a research methods course on in-depth interviewing. Students in the class will study Turkish immigrants and he hopes his students will be able to "learn in the most active sense" by building a dataset that they can analyze collectively. Each student will learn about the research process as a whole by developing a research question, designing a sampling strategy, interviewing respondents, transcribing and analyzing data, and presenting their research findings.

For his own research, Ivan's goal is to uncover religious world views at the cultural level.  In his dissertation, he is comparing the Protestant U.S., Catholic Spain, and Islamic Egypt to explore whether residents of each society understand religious groups differently.  He will examine how English, Spanish, and Arabic can shape how native speakers of each language understand religious groups in each society. For example, do Christians understand Jews differently in the U.S. and Islam? If so, what are the differences, and how might we explain them?

In the end, the goal of Ivan's research is to tell us all something about what we could encourage productive inter-faith dialogue and minimize conflict.  What would the perfect religious institution look like?  "If we are able to create a picture of religion in society at its best, perhaps we can highlight what we need to change," he says. Ivan develop his research next year as a Research Fellow at the American University of Cairo in Egypt.

Ivan's enthusiasm at promoting undergraduate research, his unique ability to reach students with diverse backgrounds, and his timely dissertation research makes him and outstanding graduate student! The University Graduate School commends the faculty in the Department of Sociology for equipping Ivan with a broad array of skills and for furthering Indiana University's commitment to excellence in research, teaching and service.

Join us to discuss mental health resources for IU graduate students!

The University Graduate School and graduate students from the Department of Sociology are forming a working group to address mental health issues amongst our graduate student population at IU.  

Group members will meet periodically throughout the semester to:

 -  Catalog current mental health resources that target graduate student needs and create a new web resource
 -  Identify limitations and brainstorm solutions/strategies for rectifying these deficiencies
 -  Poll graduate students about what mental health needs are most pressing at IU

We hope you are enthusiastic about improving graduate student mental health at Indiana University and encourage all interested students to respond.

TO JOIN: email iugradschool@gmail.com and let us know you’re interested.

If you have any questions, please email Sociology Graduate Student Rachel La Touche at rlatouch@indiana.edu.  A preliminary group meeting will be scheduled toward the end of March/beginning of April.