Indiana University Graduate School

Procter & Gamble’s Doctoral Recruiting Program Accepting Applications for Internships

2012-01-25T13:40:00.004-05:00

Many graduate students will put their head down and successfully plow through their graduate research program in 4-6 years. At the end of their graduate career, many may still be asking themselves the following questions:

What can I do with my PhD outside academia?
How can I make myself competitive in today’s job market?
Do I prefer fundamental research, applied research, or a combination of both?

The Procter & Gamble doctoral internship program, a 20+ year old program, is designed to answer these very questions for STEM graduate students before completion of their graduate studies. Most specifically, our internships will allow students to:

Explore career options by giving them an inside look into an industrial research culture;
Build their resume by supplementing their graduate research experience; and
Demonstrate how they can apply their expertise and skills for real world applications.

Procter & Gamble’s Doctoral Recruiting Program is currently accepting applications for a limited number of internship opportunities for students pursuing Ph.D.s in most Engineering (all disciplines), Chemistry (all disciplines), Life Sciences (all disciplines), Mathematical Science, Material Science, Veterinary Science, and Nutrition. The program is a paid, full time summer internship at our Cincinnati, OH or Boston, MA research facilities. The preferred period for the 10 to 12 week internship is June 1 to September 1. At P&G, Intern sessions are considered temporary employment, with a predicted ending point. No full-time employment commitments are made; however, depending on satisfactory completion of certain criteria, candidates may be considered for full-time positions upon obtaining their PhD.

To Apply:

Please go to www.experiencepg.com

Click on Search Jobs

Enter Job #RND00002218

Click Apply

Questions?? Connect with us on:

Spring Presentations about International Awards Begin Friday, Jan 27, 2012

2012-01-24T13:46:00.004-05:00

Spring Presentations about International Awards

Presentations about preparing applications and finding funding for international awards to be held throughout the spring semester. Description of sessions with dates, times and locations at: Student Awards for International Study and Research.

The first presentation will be this Friday January 27, 2:30-4:00 in Ballantine 215. It will focus on preparing applications for awards sponsored by the University Graduate School and the Office of the Vice President for International Affairs (OVPIA) and using the PIVOT database to find funding.

OVPIA maintains a distribution list of students interested in applying for awards during calendar year 2012. To be added to the list, send an email to Advisor for International Awards: Paul Fogleman (pfoglema@indiana.edu).

Office of the Vice President for International Affairs
201 N. Indiana Ave.Bloomington, IN 47408
T: (812) 855-3948
F: (812) 855-6271

Grant writing workshop for Native American and Indigenous students Feb 3-5, 2012.

2012-01-24T00:47:00.000-05:00

Indiana University, in cooperation with the First Nations Educational and Cultural Center (FNECC), Midwest Crossroads AGEP and the SACNAS chapter at Indiana University is sponsoring a grant writing workshop for Native American and Indigenous students in science and their mentors.

AGEP will provide travel, campus lodging and meals for up to 20 undergraduate or graduate students and their mentors to attend this important workshop.

The workshop will be held February 3 - 5, 2012 at the Bloomington campus.

Application: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/D2686LC
Application deadline: January 20, 2012
Decision Notification: January 24, 2012

Event flyer: http://www.indiana.edu/~agep/?p=177

Grant-in-aid fellowships deadline is Friday, January 27, 2012

2012-01-24T00:40:00.001-05:00

DEADLINE is Friday, January 24, 2012.

Grant in Aid of Doctoral Research
For advanced Bloomington graduate students for unusual research expenses incurred in connection with doctoral dissertation research; maximum one $1,000 award.

Grant in Aid of Master's of Fine Arts Projects
For advanced Bloomington MFA students for unusual expenses incurred in connection with MFA projects; maximum one $1,000 award.

January 2012 Graduate Student of the Month: Benjamin Thorne

2012-01-10T12:38:00.001-05:00

Benjamin Thorne
Department of History
January 2012 Student of the Month

IU History Graduate Student Ben Thorne

IU History Graduate Student M. Benjamin Thorne is a 2011-12 Harry Frank Guggenheim Dissertation Fellowship recipient for the current academic year. The award supports students in the dissertation writing stage who have researched problems of violence, aggression or dominance.

The award is prestigious because the competition comes from all over the world. Applicants may be citizens of any country, conducting doctoral research at colleges or universities in anywhere in the world, so long as the student’s research relates to the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation’s concern with violence.Thorne’s dissertation The Anxiety of Proximity: The “Gypsy Question” in Romanian Society, 1934-1944 and Beyond looks at the uneasy relationship Romania has had with its longtime Roma residents.

“Romania had and still has today the largest population of Roma, also known as Gypsies, in Europe. Their history in Romania is somewhat unique because they were enslaved there for close to 500 years. They were emancipated in the mid-nineteenth century roughly around the time slaves here [in the United States] were emancipated,” he said.

Romania in the 1930’s and 1940’s was 90 percent peasant and the nation was eager to promote the image of a modern, civilized nation, Thorne said. In the eyes of many nationalists, the Roma complicated this vision. The Roma population was “partly nomadic, largely illiterate, and impoverished, although that had as much to do with racism and Romanian society as their own culture.”

It also didn’t help that in memoirs written by West European travelers to Romania, writers would seize on the image of the ‘savage gypsy’ to the point that it became a kind of symbol of Romania. This was not the image Romanian intellectuals wished to promote, Thorne said.

“A debate developed as to how to best deal with this population. My dissertation looks at the origins of this debate, and then at how Romanian society became increasingly radicalized over the course of the 1930s and 40s. Eugenics came to dominate this debate and Roma were perceived as a biological threat and a problem that required a solution rather than a population that could somehow be embraced or Romanian-ized or assimilated,” he said.

“[Romania] began deportations during WWII to a region of Ukraine that Romania occupied called Transnistria. It’s difficult to assess exactly how many, but at least 25,000 were deported, quite possibly more than that. [I researched] what it was like for the Roma in Transnistria, what the camps were like for them there, what strategies they employed for survival.”

Not all of the Roma were deported, but Thorne believes there were plans to deport more, possibly all of them.

“But as the tide of the war changed—Romania was allied with Nazi Germany— the leader of Romania, Ion Antonescu wanted to modify his policies in the event he had to switch alliances. He eventually tried to pursue this option, but was deposed by a coup in August of 1944. That new government did switch their allegiance to the allies that same day.”

“The ‘anxiety of proximity’ [in the dissertation’s title] refers to the anxiety about Romanian identity that was posed by Roma in Romanian society,” Thorne said. “What does it mean—Romanian nationalists asked themselves—when we’re trying to promote ourselves as a modern society and we have these nomads running around our country?” Thorne said some Romanians were also anxious about their identity because it wasn’t always clear who was Romanian and who was Roma.

“Roma were starting to assimilate during [the interwar period]. Nomadism was in decline and more of them were settling on the outskirts of villages, and as a result you had some intermarriage. So if someone had a darker complexion, then you might think that person is really Roma. With the deportations, this is one of the reasons that they stopped is because it really brought these anxieties to the forefront. People began to complain to the government because their husband or wife or brother or sister had been deported and they’d say, no, we’re ethnic Romanians, what are you doing? You’re picking the wrong people,” he said.

It’s not a question that has faded into the background since WWII. Last year, France and Italy both expelled Roma from their borders and destroyed Roma settlements, and similar actions were taken in Hungary, Sweden, Denmark and other countries.

Choosing Romania

Thorne’s interest in Russia and Eastern Europe began when he was very young. His parents watched the news religiously and he said he was curious as to why Ronald Reagan talked about the Soviet Union as the “evil empire.” His interest continued into college where as an undergrad at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC, Thorne took courses in Russian and Eastern European history and did a semester abroad in Warsaw, Poland.

“It’s funny,” he said, “because when I got to Guilford, I knew I wanted to major in history and English—I wanted to be a double major—but very quickly I realized I also wanted to specialize in Russian and East European History. I thought I was going to work on probably Poland, but then I started to think about it my senior year and I thought, you know, lots of people work on Poland and Czechoslovakia. I want to do something different. That’s about the same time I became interested in Roma and the Holocaust.”

Thorne took a year off to consider what country he wanted to specialize in and he joined AmeriCorps.

“Then I started teaching at a high school and one year turned into three, and then I was in my fourth year and I thought if I don’t do this now, it’s never going to happen. I buckled up and did my research and decided I wanted to focus on Romania because the history of the country is fascinating, particularly the Roma element of it,” he said.

“Once I knew that, really, there are only a few universities that have a specialization in Romanian studies – IU, Pittsburgh and Illinois. All three are good programs, but I knew I wanted to be at an institution where my advisor had interests similar to my own because I thought that level of guidance and support was important,” he said.

“I visited the IU campus and met with several faculty members and with graduate students, I toured the library and its resources for Eastern Europe, and the Russian and East European Institute (REEI), and I was blown away by everything that IU had to offer. Historically IU has always had a strong program in Eastern European Studies and in Romanian Studies in particular, and I felt like it would be a tradition I would be proud to be a part of.”

Thorne started his graduate studies in Fall 2003, and at the time, he had not yet been to Romania, despite his knowledge of its history. He had, however, been to Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, and the summer before he completed intensive Romanian language training at IU as part of the Summer Workshop on Slavic, East European, and Central Asian languages (SWEESL), which is “the largest program of its kind in the country, certainly one of the oldest,” he said. Once established in his degree program, Thorne was able to visit Romania for intensive language training the following summer, and, as he puts it, to “sort of get his feet wet in the archives.”

Later he spent five months researching at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a Raul Hilberg Fellow, followed by nine months in Romania doing research thanks to fellowships from Fulbright-Hays and the Social Science Research Council, and from IU—the Sarah & Albert Ruben Scholarship for the study of the Holocaust from Jewish Studies, and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the History Department, among others. Last year Thorne received a Dissertation Completion Fellowship in East European Studies from American Council of Learned Societies.

“The year before I went to Romania when I was applying for research grants, I applied to six major external fellowships and I used the IU GradGrants Center. I went at least two or three times and I attended IU’s Fulbright workshops too. My advisor and other faculty also looked at my project statements, and I actually got every single grant I applied for, and I think that’s pretty rare,” he said. “I got quite lucky, obviously, but my success speaks to the quality of the programs and faculty here at IU. Without them, none this would have been possible.”

Thorne is currently on the job market and on January 13, 2012, he will defend his dissertation.

“I’m looking forward to it,” Thorne said. “This is a moment that I’ve been working towards for so many years, and I think it’s going to be a great conversation with my committee members. Once you leave graduate school, the opportunities you get to have that much concerted attention on your research are few and far between, so it’s definitely a moment to cherish while you have it.”

Contact: Erika Lee, The University Graduate School, ebigalee@indiana.edu.

The Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS): Now accepting applications for 2012-13 Postdoctoral Fellows and Visiting Scholars Programs

2012-01-10T12:06:00.002-05:00

The Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS) solicits applications for its Postdoctoral Fellows and Visiting Scholars Programs for the 2012-2013 academic year. Postdoctoral Fellows are given an annual salary of $60,000 for up to three years to engage in a program of original research, and are provided with additional funds for travel and research support. Visiting Scholars often come with their own support, but CRCS can occasionally offer supplemental funding.

We seek researchers who wish to interact with both computer scientists and colleagues from other disciplines, and have a demonstrated interest in connecting their research agenda with societal issues. We are particularly interested in candidates with interests in Technology & Accessibility, Privacy & Security, and/or Economics and Computer Science, and those who may be interested in engaging in one of our ongoing projects:

A Health Data Marketplace
Privacy for Social Science Research
Privacy and Security in Targeted Advertising
Trustworthy Crowdsourcing
Language-Based Security

Harvard University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. We are particularly interested in attracting women and underrepresented groups to participate in CRCS. For further information about the Center and its activities, see http://crcs.seas.harvard.edu/.

Application Procedure
A cover letter, CV, research statement, copies of up to three research papers, and up to three letters of reference should be sent to: Postdoctoral Fellows and Visiting Scholars Programs Center for Research on Computation and Society crcs-apply@seas.harvard.edu

References should send their letters directly, and Visiting Scholar applicants may provide a list of references rather than having letters sent.

The application deadline for full consideration is January 15, 2012.

Indiana Space Grant Consortium (INSGC) Offering Science Grants; Deadline Feb 24

2012-01-05T11:54:00.002-05:00

The Indiana Space Grant Consortium (INSGC) is offering funding support for IUB students majoring in STEM disciplines.

DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 24, 2012

Key Dates

Application system opens December 1, 2011
Deadline: February 24, 2012
Announcement of Recipients: April 2012

Eligibility

Students attending INSGC affiliate institutions (IU Bloomington is an affiliate institution)
US citizens
Enrolled in a STEM discipline major
At least a 2.5 GPA
INSGC encourages students to be enrolled full time

INSGC 2011-2012 Undergraduate Scholarships
Financial Support: Most undergraduate scholarships will be at the $1500 level. Exceptional students will be considered for a small number of competitively awarded, higher-profile $3000 awards.

INSGC 2011-2012 Graduate Fellowships
Financial Support:

Masters Fellowships: $6,000 - $9,000 - Masters fellowship awards do not require proposals.
Doctoral Fellowships in Science Education, Science, or Engineering: $10,000 - $20,000
Doctoral fellowship awards based in part on project proposals (may include dissertation research activity).
Fellowship Guidelines
Masters Fellowship Application
Doctoral Fellowship Application

Research funding is also available for IUB students and faculty
https://engineering.purdue.edu/INSGC/competition_files/Funding_Opportunities

Internships for IUB students:
https://engineering.purdue.edu/INSGC/competition_files/INSGC_Internship_Application

Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning grants announced

2012-01-04T10:58:00.001-05:00

The Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning (CITL) provides instructional support for instructors of all levels at IU Bloomington–from individual consultations with teachers to support for high-profile educational initiatives that impact the entire campus.

CITL sponsors a number of grants and awards to support IUB faculty members in developing innovative approaches to teaching and learning. Note that the application deadline for all CITL-sponsored grants and awards falls annually on the third Thursday in February; this year that falls on February 16, 2012. Please see the programs below, and contact CITL with any questions.

http://citl.indiana.edu/grants/index.php

Happy Holidays from the University Graduate School

2011-12-16T17:34:00.002-05:00

Invitation to join Spring 2012 Dissertation Group

2011-12-16T09:44:00.001-05:00

December 13, 2011

Dear Dissertator,

Writing Tutorial Services invites you to participate in our Spring 2012 Dissertation Group! Over the Fall semester, we have piloted a program designed to better address the needs of graduate students as they write their dissertations and dissertation proposals. The program also aims to help introduce students to resources available to them in the library and on the web.

Program Expectations

Participants will:

attend an orientation session on Wednesday, January 11 at 7pm
commit to regular attendance for the full 14-week session
keep a writing log of their goals and progress
provide us with ongoing feedback about the program

Dissertation Group Facilitators will:

lead a short workshop at the beginning of each session
facilitate group discussion of goals, strategies, and long-term writing plans
help participants to remain on-task (and away from email, facebook, youtube, or other distractions)
be available to offer advice or feedback on the writing process

Writing Group Location and Schedule

Orientation:

Wednesday, January 11 at 7pm (location TBA)

Weekly meetings:

All groups will meet at Writing Tutorial Services, located in the Wells Library Information Commons. These meetings will run from the week of January 16 to the week of April 16.

We will be offering groups at the following times:

Mondays, 5:30pm-8:30pm (Facilitator: Mike Rings)
Tuesdays, 9am-12pm (Facilitator: Holly Schreiber)
Wednesdays, 11am-2pm (Facilitator: Drew Koke)
Fridays, 9am-12pm (Facilitator: Abi Grose)

The structure of each meeting will be as follows:

Group work (1 hour). This will be facilitated by a WTS graduate tutor who will discuss writing and motivational strategies, followed by 5-10 minutes for each member of the group to share their progress since the last meeting and set goals for structured writing time.
Structured writing time (2 hours). All members of the group will spend the remaining two hours of the session working on their individual projects. While this time will be focused on individual work, the WTS tutor and other members of the writing group will be nearby to answer any questions and offer support.

If you would like to participate in the program, please complete the accompanying application form and email it to Holly Schreiber (heschrei@indiana.edu) as soon as possible. Applications will be considered on a first-come, first-served basis.

WTS Dissertation Group Application_form.pdf

Sincerely,

Abi Grose
Drew Koke
Mike Rings
Holly Schreiber

WTS Dissertation Group Facilitators

Applications open for the Sara and Albert Reuben Scholarships To Support the Study of the Holocaust

2011-12-15T11:21:00.000-05:00

The Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program
at Indiana University
announces the

2012-2013
Sara and Albert Reuben Scholarships
To Support the Study of the Holocaust

Two Scholarships: One up to $3,000 and one up to $10,000.

Application deadlines:
Graduate students: Thursday, March 8, 2012
Undergraduates: Thursday, March 1, 2012

During the academic year 2012c2013, the Sara and Albert Re uben scholarships may support funding to attend Holocaust-related conferences, to do research in archives and libraries, to subsidize Holocaust-related internship, to engage in reseJrch and to support honors theses, master's theses, or a dissertation, and other academic initiatives related to the Holocaust. . The monies can only be awarded in the fall and/or spring when the recipient is a full-time student.

REQUIREMENTS: The scholarships are open to all Indiana University Bloomington undergraduate and
graduate students from any department or college on campus. Undergraduate students must have a minimum GPA of 3.4. Students must be enrolled at Indiana University Bloomington during the Spring 2012 semester (the semester of application) and continue as enrolled students during the semester or year when the scholarship funding is awarded.

APPLICATION PROCEDURE: Please submit a proposal, budget, (undergraduates - a resume), and letter of reference to Professor Shaul Magid, Associate Director via e-mail: smagid@indiana.edu or to Professor Magid at: Borns Jewish Studies Program, Indiana University, Goodbody Hall 326, 1011 E. 3rJ Street, Bloomington, IN 47405-7005; Phone (812) 855-0453; FAX (812) 855-4314.
Note: Jewish Studies major, certificate, and Hebrew minor students should apply using the application forms for continuing jewish Studies student scholarships and internships.

ANNOUNCEMENT OF SCHOLARSHIPS: Recipients will be notified in early April, 2012 and will be recognized at the annual jewish Studies Program Student-Faculty Dinner on Sunday, Aprill5, 2012. These scholarships are a gift from Candice and Larry Reuben in memory of parents and Indianapolis residents Sara and Albert Reuben who were committed to the adva ncement of learning and research about this crucial dimension of modern history.

Congrats to Linda Hostetter on winning the IU Staff Merit Award.

2011-12-09T14:05:00.002-05:00

The University Graduate School would like to join IU in recognizing Linda Hostetter, Informatics, who will be receiving an IU Bloomington Staff Merit Award next week!

A celebration of their service to the university at the annual Staff Merit Award ceremony will be held at 3:30 p.m. on Monday, December 12, 2011 in the Frangipani Room at the Indiana Memorial Union.

These awards are given to staff members who have exhibited an extraordinary commitment to service, workplace innovation, and job performance. Six staff members receive the award each year. They were nominated by their departments and chosen by a committee of their peers. Linda was among the six chosen this year:

Linda Hostetter, Graduate Admission Coordinator, School of Informatics and Computing
An IU employee of over two decades, Linda has welcomed, nurtured, advised, and taken care of students from all over the world. With tremendous kindness and motherly wisdom, she has helped students (and sometimes faculty) negotiate the challenges of the academic world. In shepherding the many international students through the opportunities and tribulations of studying and living in a foreign country, Linda has not only made many grateful friends, but she has fundamentally contributed to their academic and personal success at IU.

Opportunities for grads/postdocs related to social media, digital media, and the influences of technology.

2011-12-08T15:16:00.000-05:00

Microsoft Research Postdocs.

Who: Newly minted/about-to-be-minted PhD students working on social media topics from a social science perspective

Deadline: December 12, 2011

More Information:

http://socialmediacollective.org/2011/11/15/microsoft-research-social-media-postdoc-opening/

Special issue of JOBEM on Socially-Mediated Publicness.

Who: Scholars who want to publish their work on socially-mediated publicness in a fantastic journal experimenting with open-access

Deadline: December 12, 2011 for brief abstracts; January 6, 2012 for complete articles

More Information:

http://socialmediacollective.org/2011/09/13/socially-mediated-publicness-a-call-for-papers/

Digital Media & Learning Summer Institute.

Who: Graduate students/young postdocs doing work touching on policy and innovation around digital media & learning

Deadline: January 9, 2012

Application & More Info:

http://dmlcentral.net/call-for-applications-2012-summer-institute-program

Microsoft Research PhD Internships.

Who: Current PhD students working on social media topics from a social science perspective

Deadline: January 10, 2012

More Information:

http://socialmediacollective.org/2011/11/28/social-science-phd-internships-at-microsoft-research-new-england-spring-summer-2012/

Human Trafficking & Technology Research Grants.

Who: Scholars who can research the role of tech in different facets of human trafficking

Deadline: February 17, 2012

Request for Proposals:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/focus/education/human-trafficking-rfp.aspx

Pathways to Science: Opportunities for prospective/current graduate students and postdocs

2011-12-05T10:57:00.000-05:00

Current and future graduate students:

Current and future Postdocs:

http://www.pathwaystoscience.org/Postdocs_portal.asp

Fulbright Program Offers New Public-Policy Fellowship

2011-12-01T16:35:00.000-05:00

The U.S. State Department has announced a new Fulbright fellowship focused on public policy. The program, which started accepting applications this month, will support master’s and Ph.D. students who want to serve in professional positions within foreign-government ministries while also conducting research in policy areas like public health, energy, and economic development.

U.S. Embassies, Fulbright Commissions (where applicable), and host country governments will coordinate appropriate professional placements for candidates in public policy areas including, but not limited to, public health, education, agriculture, justice, energy, environment, public finance, economic development, information technology, and communications.

The awards are available in Haiti, Thailand, and nine other countries around the world. Under the Obama administration, the Fulbright Program has put an emphasis on supporting fellowships that help develop ideas that contribute to meeting global challenges, like developing renewable energy or fighting HIV/AIDS.

Deadline for application and all supporting materials: February 1, 2012.

GRE Revised General Test: concordance information

2011-11-07T14:33:00.000-05:00

Concordance information for the GRE revised General Test is now available on the ETS website:

You can access concordance tables: http://www.ets.org/gre/institutions/scores

Review the entire set of GRE Guidelines for the Use of Scores: www.ets.org/gre/guidelines

Or view revised score scale information using the GRE Comparison Tool for Business Schools: http://www.ets.org/gre/institutions/about/mba/comparison_tool

We have experts on hand to answer your questions, please contact the GRE Helpline at grehelpline@ets.org or 1-609-683-2011. You may also contact representative Matthew Kadlubowski directly.

Matthew T. Kadlubowski

Associate Director, Global Client Relations

Educational Testing Service

Princeton, New Jersey 08541

e-mail: mkadlubowski@ets.org

Phone: 609-683-2011

Fax: 609-683-2310

Cell: 609-751-6849

Upcoming workshop: Advanced Strategies for Funding Databases

2011-10-27T23:37:00.000-04:00

Advanced Strategies for Funding Databases
A GradGrants Center Workshop

WHAT:    A hands-on workshop on finding graduate school funding in the COS Pivot and IRIS databases
WHO:    All IU graduate students
WHEN:    Wednesday, November 9, 11am-12pm
WHERE:    Student Building 230

Availability is limited to 22 seats, so be sure to come early!

Questions? Contact us at: gradgrnt@indiana.edu

This workshop is designed to help IU graduate students become proficient in using the advanced search features of COS Pivot (formerly Community of Science) and IRIS (Illinois Researcher Information Service) databases to identify funding for graduate study and research. Both databases are interdisciplinary and accessible to all IU students and faculty.

Topics to be covered include:

how to access the databases on- and off-campus
choosing keywords relevant to funding agencies
limiting searches by citizenship, deadline, funding type, location, and more
setting up funding alerts so the latest results of your searches are automatically sent to you by e-mail

The GradGrants Center
The GGC provides one-on-one assistance with grant proposal writing from our grant-winning consultants and a centralized area to access funding information. Call, email or stop by to schedule a consultation with our consultants to receive assistance with your search for funding opportunities, proposal formulation and grant writing. The GGC is a free service for all Indiana University graduate students.

Wells Library | East Tower 651 | 812-855-5281 | gradgrnt@indiana.edu | www.indiana.edu/~gradgrnt

GPSO Library Workshop: Issues in Scholarly Communication

2011-10-25T12:08:00.000-04:00

Fri, October 28, 12pm – 1pm
Herman B Wells Library E174 (Media Room)

The GPSO and IU Libraries have partnered to bring you information that's incredibly important and helpful to graduate students--information that might not be readily available in publications or websites. Please pass these events on to fellow graduate students.

The GPSO will provide free snacks! Looking forward to seeing you there!

Presenter: Jennifer Laherty, Digital Publishing Librarian and Head of IUScholarWorks

Description: This session introduces key theoretical and practical issues in contemporary scholarly communications. We’ll also suggest strategies for finding digitally archived research outside of traditional library resources. Finally, we’ll discuss how you (as a graduate student or new researcher) can prepare yourself for participating in the global scholarly communication environment.

To view all workshops, see http://www.libraries.iub.edu/index.php?pageId=3502.
Questions? Email gpso@indiana.edu.

MLK Day Celebration Essay Contest

2011-10-25T11:42:00.001-04:00

http://www.indiana.edu/~mlkjr

CIC/Smithsonian Institution Fellowship Announcement

2011-10-24T14:03:00.000-04:00

Deadline: November 15, 2011 at 5 PM

The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) and the Smithsonian Institution (SI) invite fellowship applications for one-year fellowships to support research in residence at Smithsonian Institution facilities. Fellowships carry a stipend of $30,000. All fields of study that are actively pursued by the museums and research organizations of the Smithsonian Institution are eligible.

How it Works
Under this fellowship program, the Smithsonian Institution and the Fellow’s university share the cost of support. Students enrolled at CIC member universities apply through their university graduate school. Each university will nominate one application for the CIC/SI competition; the 13 nominees will be asked to submit their application electronically through the Smithsonian’s Online Application System (SOLAA).

From this pool of 13 nominations, six fellowships will be selected by the Smithsonian Institution for the CIC/SI Fellowship. Applicants will be notified of the award decision by January 1, 2012.

All unfunded applications will be eligible for consideration in the general Smithsonian Institution competition. Review of applications for the general competition begins on January 15, 2012.

Eligibility
Students must have completed all course work for their programs, and must have been admitted into doctoral candidacy and satisfied all requirements except completion of the dissertation in order to qualify. These fellowships are restricted to IUB students only.

Benefits
The stipend is $30,000 for one year, and fellows are eligible for tuition and health insurance benefits in accordance with their university policy. Fellows are eligible to receive allowances for related expenses and for temporary relocation to the Smithsonian.

Application Instructions
To be considered for the CIC/SI Fellowship, applicants must complete the attached CIC/Smithsonian Institution Fellowship Application form. A pdf of the completed application must be submitted electronically by November 15, 2011 at 5 PM to the graduate fellowship office at the student’s home institution.

Contact for Indiana University:
Maxine Watson, Associate Dean
The University Graduate School
Kirkwood Hall 111
130 S. Woodlawn Avenue
Bloomington, IN 47405-7104
(812) 855-8853
watsonm@indiana.edu

APPLICATION FOR SMITHSONIAN FELLOWSHIP
graduate.indiana.edu/pdf/Smithsonian-application-2012.doc

Note: Rather than also include a PDF list of contacts, we simply listed the IUB contact Maxine Watson (see above).

Free Workshop on Publishing Research & Longer Documents in Word

2011-10-18T12:06:00.000-04:00

IT Training Workshops are free for IU graduate students.

Thursday, October 27, 2011, 5:30pm - 9:00pm
Word 2010: Publishing Research & Longer Documents
Information Commons room IC103
This workshop lasts 3+ hours.

To sign up, go to the IT Training Workshop site and scroll down to find the correct listing.

Intended for experienced users of Word who want to create long documents such as research papers, team project reports, books, and graduate theses or dissertations. This workshop explores the best method for structuring long documents in Word and demonstrates how to reliably assemble long documents from multiple source files. It highlights Word's advanced publishing features and automated functions, so participants will also learn how to create lists of figures and captions, a table of contents and a document index.

What You'll learn:

create and edit an outline
collapse, expand and relocate sections of an outline
create and manage master documents
create a table of contents in a master document
create captions and lists of figures
use advanced search options
format and generate an index
format footers in a master document
print a master document

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2011 Postdoctoral Appreciation Day

2011-10-14T15:02:00.001-04:00

The IUB Office of Postdoctoral Affairs is proud to present:
2011 Postdoctoral Appreciation Day
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
1:00 – 3:30 pm

Panel Discussion
Transitioning from graduate student to postdoc and from postdoc to career

1:00 - 2:00 pm, IMU, State Room East

Panelists: Stella Aniagyei, Postdoctoral Research Associate; Megan Sullivan, Postdoctoral Fellow; Nikole Miller, Pre-Postdoctoral Research Associate; and, Danilo Dragoni, Previous Postdoctoral Appointment.

Topics to be discussed include: appropriate postdoctoral appointments and details associated with pursing professional placements.

This session is co-sponsored by the IUB Chapter of the NSF-funded Midwest AGEP Alliance.

Poster Session
For postdoctoral scholars in the sciences
2:30 - 3:30 pm, IMU, State Room West
Set-up from 2:00 - 2:30 pm
Come share your latest research and network with other postdocs. Light refreshments will be served.

Call for Poster Titles
Send your name, lab affiliation, and poster title to postdoc@indiana.edu by Wednesday October 26, 2011.

Questions? Please contact Dean Maxine Watson, watsonm@indiana.edu, 855-5697.

Fall 2011 Responsible Conduct of Research Workshop - Collaborative Research

2011-10-11T09:49:00.001-04:00

All interested graduate students and postdocs are welcome to attend.

Date: October 17, 2011:
Time: 4 - 6 pm
Location: IMU Maple Room

TO REGISTER:
http://researchadmin.iu.edu/EO/eo_sessions.html

The University Graduate School, The Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics & American Institutions, and the Office of Research Ethics, Education and Policy (REEP) will be conducting two panel-style workshops this semester on the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR).

This series is designed to introduce and explore the principles and practices of RCR. RCR constitutes the integration of research ethics, best practices, and adherence to professional and regulatory standards.

Panel Participants:

Kevin Guidry, Graduate student in the School of Education and the Awards Officer in the Graduate and Professional Student Organization (GPSO).
Dr. Bernice Pescosolido, Distinguished Professor and Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology.
Dr. Kimberly Rosvall, Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Biology.

For more information regarding this workshop, contact REEP at reep@iu.edu or visit http://researchadmin.iu.edu/EO/eo_docs/RCR_collaborative_research2011.pdf

October 2011 Graduate Student of the Month: Ishani Banerji

2011-10-05T12:32:00.002-04:00

Ishani Banerji
Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences

Ishani Banerji

IU graduate student Ishani Banerji is enamored with the academic lifestyle.

“To me it seems like the perfect life, which probably makes me a huge nerd,” Banerji said. “But my favorite part of America is academic campuses. I feel the most at home on academic campuses; they’re familiar to me, comfortable. I know what is expected of me, I know the culture and I love that to some extent everyone here is engaged in the pursuit of knowledge. I just love it.”

“[For my undergraduate degree,] I went to this tiny liberal arts college called Denison University [in Granville, Ohio] where you simply have to form relationships with the people on campus. The faculty was so supportive, they were always there for me and became like a second family. For me, I really loved that idea of having that relationship and being embedded in this network of people who all really, really care about education.”

“At Denison, I was able to do a lot of research as an undergraduate because there aren’t any grad students. So I knew I loved doing research and [when I was working on my master’s degree] at Wake Forest I got to do a lot more research, particularly cross-cultural research, which I had become interested in my senior year of college.” she said.

At the big social psychology conference in January the year Banerji was looking for a doctoral program to join, she met a lot of graduate students from the places she would be interviewing with later that semester.

“As I was applying to Ph.D. programs, IU wasn’t my top choice. I thought who wants to be in the Midwest surrounded by cornfields? Then at this conference, I met a lot of students who barely gave me the time of day. But the IU students—I mean, the entire department—came to my poster presentation. They were all there and making that effort to make me feel welcome and I hadn’t even decided where I was going to go yet.”

It was at this same conference where she first met her current advisor Dr. Eliot Smith.

“Until that point, I felt that there were two kinds of faculty; the super-brilliant, super-productive, big names in their fields, but kind of [arrogant], and the faculty who are understanding and friendly, but haven’t done as much with their careers. The faculty I had met who were well-known in the field were just not people who I could look up to socially and personally. Dr. Smith is brilliant, but is totally un-egotistical about it,” she said.

“That brought me to IU.”

“I struggled a lot [with the decision] because I had other highly-ranked options, but because of my experience at Denison, that kind of colored it. I knew I wanted a place where I would be comfortable because you don’t want to be in a Ph.D. program that is highly ranked, but then hate yourself every day for three or four or five or six or however many years you’re going to be there [because you don’t feel like you belong]. It’s not worth it.”

Banerji is currently at the start of her fourth year. She took her qualifying exams last year.

“The social psychology program within the psychology department is the only one that has exams, like actual exams, whereas all the other programs do papers. It’s a two-day exam with three or four questions to answer each day, and about four hours a day to do so. It’s a summer of reading as much as you can and memorizing as much as you can because you can’t bring anything into the room when you take the exam,” she said.

“All the more senior students will tell you that the faculty aren’t interested in setting you up to fail—they want you to succeed, you’re going to be fine. So look at it as an opportunity to read a lot, and learn a lot and really get embedded in the literature; that all sounds fine, but before you take the exam it’s still really, really scary. But now, post-exam, that’s exactly what I’m telling the students who are taking it this year.”

At IU, Banerji’s research has taken a lot of different lines. She studies group emotions, an interest she picked up from working with her advisor, but Banerji gives it a cross-cultural twist.

“[Group emotions are] the emotions you experience when you think of yourself as a member of a certain group. So the emotions you would feel as a woman, or as an American, as opposed to the emotions you feel just as yourself,” she said.“My first project, which has now become this monster of a project that has taken me three years to get done is looking at American, Chinese and Germans [participants]. I have collaborators in both of those countries—it was actually amazing how I found those collaborators because nobody in my department does cross-cultural work,” she said.

The German collaborator was a graduate student from the University of Hamburg that she met at the annual social psychology conference. The Chinese collaborator is a more round-about story.

“We had a speaker from the University of Chicago come to the department to give a talk. I met her over lunch and was talking to her about my project and how I really wanted to collect some data from Asia. She said she knew this professor who teaches in New Zealand who happened to be going to China to give some talks. She put me in touch with him and he found two students in China who were interested in collaborating with the project.”

“It’s wonderful to me that the faculty in my department are so supportive of students doing work with other people. Right now I’m collaborating with three of the four faculty members in my department, including my advisor. This year I’ll be at Santa Barbara to work with my advisor’s collaborator, Diane Mackie. Santa Barbara has a much more diverse population so some of the research I’m interested in doing—looking at some of these various racial differences, stereotypes and prejudices, I can do over there a little bit more easily than at IU,” she said.

“It feels great to know that you have multiple lines of research and that there are multiple people out there that you can turn to for feedback and advice and just work with,” Banerji said. For example, in another line of Banerji’s research, she is working with another of her advisor’s students, Dr. Charles Seger, who recently graduated and is currently teaching in the UK.

“There has been a lot of research that suggests that when you have contact with the members of an out-group, so say white people interacting with African-Americans, that your prejudice towards that out-group goes down and you have a more positive outlook. So, research in this area has come up with lots of different versions of this main idea of contact. What I became interested in is the idea of physical contact, but not with the people of the out-group, but with the products of the out-group,” she said. This resulted in Banerji teaming up with Dr. B J Rydell on a project involving turbans.

“In the first study I did, we gave people turbans and we either had them look at the turban, or look and touch the turban if they wanted to, or they got no exposure to the turban. Then we measured their prejudice towards Muslims.” They are now repeating this study with do-rags and measuring prejudice against African-Americans.

“For the turban study we found that seeing the turban had some prejudice-reducing effect, but it was touching the turban that really seemed to make a difference. We’re hoping to see the same thing with the do-rag,” she said.

“I’m also going to be doing a study with Charlie in the UK where we’re going to be giving people hummus either labeled Nigel’s Bean Dip or call it something in Arabic with Arabic writing all over it. We’ll ask the subjects to taste it and we’ll measure their attitudes towards Muslims.”

“So that is the basic idea—that a lot of the time, when you’re interacting with a different culture, it’s not with the people, it’s seeing CNN’s coverage of terrorists or going to an ethnic food restaurant,” she said. “It’s all exciting.”

Media Contacts:
Erika Lee, Director of Communications, The University Graduate School, ebigalee@indiana.edu
Ana Saraceno, The IU Graduate and Professional Student Organization, gpso@indiana.edu

The Graduate and Professional Student Organization and the University Graduate School would like to congratulate Ishani Banerji on receiving the GPSO/UGS Recognition Award. Students selected for this award were nominated by a faculty member from within their department, and selected by the GPSO and UGS for excellence in their graduate studies at Indiana University.

Winter 2011 Commencement Ceremony and GradFair

2011-10-03T15:53:00.001-04:00

Winter 2011 Ceremony
December Commencement exercises are open to candidates for graduate and undergraduate degrees. The ceremony typically runs 90 minutes and includes the procession of degree candidates, an address by a Commencement speaker, induction into the IU Alumni Association, the hooding of Ph.D. and doctoral candidates, and the conferral of degrees.

Saturday, December 17, 2011
Assembly Hall, 1001 E. 17th Street
Bloomington, IN 47408

The 2011 Winter Commencement Handbook is now online at:
http://www.commencement.iu.edu/bloomington/graduation-info/winter-2011-commencement/index.shtml

Fall GradFair for Winter Commencement:

October 11-12, 2011,
State Rooms East and West,
Indiana Memorial Union.
Hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

At GradFair, students may rent caps and gowns, purchase graduate announcements, class rings, and diploma frames, and have formal pictures taken in academic regalia. They may also visit information tables hosted by University Ceremonies and Commencement Services and the Indiana University Alumni Association.

More information on GradFair:
http://www.commencement.iu.edu/bloomington/caps-and-gowns/gradfair.shtml

Preparing Future Faculty Conference 2012

2011-10-01T22:17:00.002-04:00

The 17thAnnual Preparing Future Faculty Conference
Not A Zero-Sum Game:Moving Forward with Research, Service, and Teaching

Friday, February 24, 2012
IMU Solarium
8:30am - 4:30pm

http://www.iub.edu/~pffc/
FREE for graduate students

TO ATTEND:
RSVP for free lunch with name, department, and year in program to iupffc@gmail.com

This conference is sponsored by the University Graduate School and other participating departments and is FREE to all IU graduate students.

Department of English Professor Stephen Watt discusses academic publishing at the 15th Annual Preparing Future Faculty Graduate Student Conference held at the IMU on Friday, Feb. 19, 2010.

This one day conference, open to all IUB graduate students, regardless of discipline, addresses the professional steps necessary for future faculty. The PFF is funded by the University Graduate School, and is organized by Sociology graduate students and their advisers.

Indiana University’s 17th Annual Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) Graduate Conference is a one-day event designed to provide graduate students from all disciplines and at all phases of their educations with important information about preparing for their future academic careers.The conference consists of four sessions addressing issues, such as graduate student concerns as they progress toward the Ph.D., building a professional record, navigating the job market, acclimating to a new faculty position, and professional opportunities within and outside of academia. Each year the conference is organized by a committee of graduate students, lead by a PFF fellow who is appointed and funded by the Sociology department and the University Graduate School.

Funding for the conference is provided by the Graduate School and other participating departments. Panelists are typically professors from IUB and surrounding universities. Special care is made to invite panelists from a diverse array of disciplines and institutions.

Contact: Deidre Redmond (dlredmon@indiana.edu)

CIC Offers Shared Access to Courses - FELP No Longer Available

2011-09-20T13:55:00.003-04:00

Sharing Access to CoursesCIC institutions have a long history of sharing faculty expertise by making specialized courses available to students from member universities.

CourseShare: CourseShare allows students to take specialized courses offered at other CIC institutions from a distance, eliminating the need to temporarily relocate. The CourseShare framework allows students to register for inter-institutionally shared courses at the same time and in the same way as regular courses.

Traveling Scholar Program: This program allows doctoral students to spend up to a full academic year pursuing specialized courses of study, researching unique library collections, and working in advanced laboratories and facilities at other CIC institutions —with no change in registration procedures from their home university or additional tuition.

The popular Foreign Language Enhancement Program (FLEP) is no longer offered as of 2011. The CIC Foreign Language Enhancement Program (FLEP) provided scholarships to help graduate students take advantage of less commonly taught languages not available at their home university, but offered at another participating CIC member university.

More information on these programs

Former FFTF Fellow Keith Erekson Receives Prestigious ‘Outstanding Teaching Award’ from the University of Texas

2011-09-16T15:48:00.000-04:00

Dr. Keith Erekson

The IU Future Faculty Teaching Fellowships Program is run through the The University Graduate School at Indiana University. Deadline for the next round of fellowships is October 14, 2011.

Once an IU Future Faculty Teaching Fellowship (FFTF) recipient, Keith Erekson is now a faculty member in the history department at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). He recently received the prestigious Outstanding Teaching Award given to only 72 faculty out of a UT system of nearly 19,000.

After receiving his Ph.D. from IU in 2008, Erekson joined the UTEP faculty and founded the Center for History Teaching & Learning (www.utep.edu/chtl), which is devoted to improving history teaching in his department and among current and future secondary-level history teachers.

He credits his experiences in the IU FFTF Program with getting him to this point.

“I don’t remember when I first heard about the program,” he said. “I think it was early on, but I remember thinking I wanted to do that. [FFTF] was always on my radar as I was going through coursework and exams.”

In 2007-08, Erekson was accepted into the FFTF program and three campuses contacted him, but two regarded him as inexpensive labor, he said.

“I would have been teaching an introductory survey history class and had a 2-2 load. One campus said straight out that’s all they expected. The other said, well, if you’re good we might let you teach an upper level class in the second semester,” he said. “Contrast that to the offer I got from IU Kokomo where I met students, took a campus tour, talked with faculty. They were really collegial. They treated me like one of their faculty members.”

At IUK, Erekson taught two upper-level history courses, attended faculty meetings, and worked in his own office space complete with printing resources. He was essentially faculty.

“It was huge, I don’t know if I can begin to quantify all the ways that helped,” he said. “The big things were that I was on campus and coded as a visiting professor even though I was in the last year of my PhD program, and also that they let me teach and design my own classes.”

“At the time IUK was pushing hybrid courses offered half in the classroom and half online. It was really enjoyable. In the History department at IUB, I had worked for the Journal of Indiana History, so I knew a lot about the topic, so I taught Indiana history as a hybrid upper-level course. The students were also really excited because although [the Indiana History course] had been listed in the catalogue, it had never been taught at IUK.”

At the end of his FFTF year, Erekson was able to say he had taught survey courses, upper-level courses, online courses and courses he had designed himself. “I had taught all these different things. So, in job interviews when they asked ‘have you taught an upper-level course?’ I could say yes.”

IUK also supported the fact that he was on the job market. He wrote his dissertation that year while teaching, but he also spent time applying for positions. “How do you prepare for sending out 55 job applications? That year I typed them up on the computer they gave me to use and printed them out on university letterhead. They really supported me in sending them out.”

In March of 2008, Erekson received an offer for his position at UTEP, he defended his dissertation in April, graduated in May, and moved to El Paso in July at which point he started fulltime without a hitch.

“I really felt like I had a lot of help when I was starting to teach and that was huge. It’s funny. After I got here, we hired a hotshot postdoc from Yale. He came into my office the second week of the semester and said 'I don’t know how to teach, please help me.' My experience was just the opposite. I felt the FFTF summer retreat and FFTF Kokomo Program was a real advantage. I had gone to the SOTL workshops at IUB, but that summer retreat was really important.”

The FFTF Program not only gave him needed experiences, Erekson said, but the edge needed to land his first position.

“I really think this fellowship gave me the ability to make the leap [into the professoriate] before the economy crashed—it was a real turning point. Instead of one more paper, one more postdoc, I was able to find a tenure-track position and get started with my career,” he said.

Erekson’s new position came with an advising component because UTEP had discovered that nearly half the students in history wanted to be high school teachers.

“They had all these pre-law and pre-grad school workshops, but then realized that many wanted to teach. So the position was designed with an open specialty, and along the way it seemed to make sense to make it a more formal path,” he said.

That’s when he started the Center for History Teaching & Learning at UTEP to help students become teachers and help the faculty become better teachers.

“Teaching was something I wanted to do. I knew it was part of the job of academic life, but I look forward to teaching. I’d worked for the auto industry before and I knew that didn’t make me feel better, but working with people did,” Erekson said. “When I was a grad student, I thought I would do things [in the classroom] differently, so it’s good to be able to put my ideas into practice and see what happens. Those classes you teach again and again are never the same, always a little different; it’s always exciting.”

Erekson offers this advice to graduate students at IU Bloomington. “Pay attention to teaching,” he said. “In every campus interview I had, and I did 12 campus interviews, teaching came up and it came up not just as what do you do in your classroom, but in a ‘our university is up for accreditation this year and we have to demonstrate outcomes, or our dean is asking us to create a senior level rubric.’ It wasn’t the questions I’d heard before. Faculty are now accountable for teaching in many ways. So in each campus visit, faculty were talking about teaching in a ‘oh boy, we-have-this-problem-we have-to-solve’ way.”

“If you know how to design a learning outcome and show students accomplished it or made an improvement in a course and showed it worked, that’s a valuable skill in the industry,” he said. “It’s not just about teaching a course. The students have to learn something and you have to prove they learned something and prove to their parents they learned something. Every time tuition is raised, the more clarity is expected about what a university is teaching. Is it specific and concrete and can you show me what it looks like if they can’t do that or better if they can?”

“It’s a myth that we do teaching by ourselves,” he said. “Teaching requires students, good timing, administration, the right course offering—all of these factors that come into play—it’s really a community activity. And it feels really good to be part of a responsive community.”

More Information on the Teaching Award

Wimbush Selected for New Commission to Study Graduate Student Pathways

2011-09-16T10:43:00.000-04:00

James C. Wimbush, Dean of the Indiana University Graduate School

Dean of the University Graduate School, James C. Wimbush, has been selected for a new commission to study the educational and career pathways graduate students take and recommend ways to help students move more easily from their studies into careers.

The Commission on Pathways Through Graduate School and Into Careers, is being created by the Council of Graduate Schools and the Educational Testing Service. In addition to Dean Wimbush, the commission includes leadership from academia and business. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the commission is tasked with examining how much graduate students know about their career options once they obtain their degrees, and how students learn about their professional opportunities after graduation and the role of graduate programs in guiding students in their transition to a career.

The findings will be disclosed in a report next spring.

McNair Director Cathi Eagan Retires After 34 Years of Service to IU

2011-09-14T11:20:00.001-04:00

In August of 2011, Cathi Eagan, long-time Director of Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program and Assistant Dean at the University Graduate School, retired from IU, but from what we hear she will continue to be busy! The staff at the University Graduate School would like to wish her the best. Here is her story of the time spent with us and a peak into her new endeavors.

When Cathi Eagan joined the University Graduate School staff in 1993 as an Assistant Dean, the first thing she noticed was that there weren’t a lot of programs at IU to groom undergraduates for graduate school.

Eagan at her retirement party in August 2011.

“I became interested in finding funds,” Eagan said, “an external grant, to be able to create a program. One year I went to the CGS (Council of Graduate Schools) meeting and sat next to someone who had a McNair Grant. It was the first competition that McNair had had and she had had her program for a couple of years. It was Vicki Kirby from the University of Missouri in Columbia.”

Inspired by that conversation, Cathi arranged to go to a grant writing session in Washington D.C., spoke with a lot of the McNair programs that existed at that time, and then wrote a proposal to create a McNair Scholars program at IU. The purpose of the program would be to help prepare students from diverse backgrounds for doctoral programs.

“So I took what I learned from the other McNair programs and what I knew from the Biology program (where she had worked previously on The Hughes Grant) and I wrote the grant,” Eagan said. “We were funding in 1995 and I’ve been working with the program ever since.”

“I think the strength of the program is that it’s an academic year program where we can get to know 25 undergraduate students very well—their personal, financial and academic background—and we can groom them into mini graduate students by the time they reach their senior year,” she said. “At that point, the students have had an undergraduate research experience, and they’ve had teaching training and teaching internships, so when they apply for graduate school their funding comes from either an AI or TA, or a fellowship of some type.”

“Over the years, perhaps the first eight years of the program, we had difficulty in learning how exactly we could prepare these students for graduate school so it didn’t interfere with their senior year. What we used to do was hold a lot of the workshops that we now hold in the summer in the fall—workshops to get them ready to apply to graduate programs. It was really getting in the middle of their academic work,” Eagan said.

“One day I was driving into work—and I still remember it—I thought what if we took one week in the summertime and we just compiled everything to help the students learn about fellowships, write the draft of their personal statements, get GRE training? And what if to pay for this, we had programs from around the country come and we could bring in the best and the brightest lecturers for these students—that’s how the senior summer camp was born,” she said. “It’s a very effective tool—we can prep our students in the summertime and they can have everything done so in the fall so they’re ready to submit applications for fellowships and graduate school.”

The senior summer camp is now in its eleventh year and it’s been duplicated in California, Chicago and by several institutions in the South. The camp lasts five days and is held in a remote location to limit distractions. Students learn about life as a graduate student, from how to be successful in their programs, to what to do if they run into complications within their departments and how to solve these situations, to how to strategically take the GRE. There is also a push to develop grant and fellowship writing skills.

Eagan is an integral part of the The Canine Express,
a group that transports shelter dogs from Indiana
to areas of the country where spay and neuter laws
have limited the number of animals for adoption,
giving the Indiana dogs a better chance at being adopted.

“They learn about fellowships, where the money is and that they need to apply for these things,” Eagan said. “Last year we had the Rhodes Scholarship recipient and the runner-up, we’ve had people who’ve gotten a Mellon Fellowship, Jacob Javits Fellowship, and so on. And I think it’s because we’ve forced them to apply to these fellowships. Even if they’re turned down, the student now has a better understanding for how to write a grant proposal and they can apply to other grants even as a graduate student.”

Even before the idea for the senior summer camp, Eagan had been invited to be part of the Penn State TRIO training team.

“I would go around the country; I did this each month for 5 years. At first I was doing GRE training and then it got so I was preparing staff for how to write fellowships and identify where the money was,” Eagan said. “And that’s where I met Orlando Taylor, Don Asher, so many of the TRIO people who are really heavy hitters. Those are the people that I invited to come to the senior summer camp. And that’s how we have so many dynamos who help us prepare our students.”

Eagan said she is looking forward to retirement, and although she’ll miss the students greatly, “it’s time to move on after 34 years.”

Over the last 25 years, when she wasn’t on campus working with students, Eagan has been working on issues of animal welfare. For the last seven years, she has taken her vacation days once a month to drive to New England with the CanINE Express; an organization that has transported more than 7100 shelter dogs to partner shelters in New England.

“In New England, the spay-and-neuter message has been heard. So the shelters there are sitting virtually empty of well-socialized, healthy dogs ready to be adopted,” she said.

Eagan is currently working to introduce better spay-and-neuter legislation in Indiana, writing grants for shelters, and taking care of her 88-year-old mother and her home. “For me, as long as I’m in Indiana, I’ll be devoted to stopping the killing of companion animals. It’s atrocious what’s happening, not only in IN, but also the Midwest and the South.”

Big Ten+ Grad Expo at Purdue

2011-08-22T14:56:00.001-04:00

If you are planning on attending graduate school, or you work with students who may be interested, please tell them about this excellent recruiting fair held at the end of September. Registration is inexpensive, Purdue is close by and they have travel scholarships available.

-- The University Graduate School

Website for the Expo:
http://www.gradschool.purdue.edu/gradexpo/studentinfo.cfm

Courtesy of the Big Ten+ Expo held at Purdue University.

"It has helped me determine what sort of program suits my interests and background best, as well as what I need to be doing for the rest of my Graduate School search." (2010 Attendee)

The Big Ten+ Grad School Expo is your one-stop shop for information about graduate study in:

Engineering
Science
Mathematics
Technology
Related Disciplines

At the graduate school fair, you'll have the opportunity to talk to faculty, graduate students, and staff from some of the nation's premier institutions. But, the Expo is more than just a grad fair. You will also have opportunities to:

Participate in workshops
Network with representatives from top-ranked universities
Receive advice from the National Science Foundation and other experts on funding your graduate education.

Come learn why you should consider an advanced degree, how to fund your graduate education, where you should study, and more.

The Big Ten+ Graduate School Exposition on Sunday and Monday September 25-26, 2011 is for you!

Concerned about the cost to attend? Apply for a travel scholarship when you submit your registration.

Please note: If you are interested in pursuing a graduate degree such as the Master's or PhD, then the Big Ten+ Grad Expo is for you! This event may be less relevant for students interested in professional degrees such as the DVM, PharmD, JD, MD, etc.

Registration and Fees: If you register online before Monday, September 19, 2011, the cost to participate in the Expo is $35, which includes a Welcome Dinner on Sunday evening, and breakfast, lunch, and admission to all activities on Monday, including workshops and the graduate school fair. If you do not register online, you are still welcome to attend the Grad Expo; however, please note that registration at the door on the day of the event is $40. If you apply for a travel scholarship, but do not receive an award, and therefore, are unable to attend the Grad Expo, your registration fee will be refunded to you, provided you request a refund prior to the event.

Graduate Student of the Month: Stacey Jacobsen

2011-08-02T09:48:00.002-04:00

Dr. Stacey Jacobsen is a recent graduate of the IU Kelley School of Business.

Stacey Jacobsen
IU Kelley School of Business, Department of Finance
August 2011

Recently graduated doctoral student Stacey Jacobsen from the IU Kelley School of Business, Department of Finance, investigated the private incentives of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), showing that the market attaches a high value to CEOs who restrain from activities that increase their private benefits.

After graduating with an undergraduate degree from Texas Christian University in Ft Worth, Texas, Dr. Jacobsen worked at an investment bank where she was involved with corporate finance activities such as mergers, acquisitions and IPOs.

“The president of the investment banking division was very interested in financial research and pushed the analysts to read academic literature, which is kind of unusual for practitioners because usually only academics read academic literature,” she said. “But I knew at some point in my career, to get to the next step in the corporate world, I was going to have to get an MBA or go to school in some form. By then I’d become interested in the research, so I gave in and decided to get a Ph.D. after years of swearing I wouldn’t.”

Dr. Jacobsen came to IU specifically to work with Dr. Utpal Bhattacharya, who became her advisor and chair of her research committee. “He believes you should ask interesting, important questions that are relevant beyond academia—issues that we care about in our everyday lives,” she said. “I thought that was something neat.”

“His test for an interesting research question is ‘Tell your mom the idea, and if she doesn’t understand it or she doesn’t find it interesting then it’s a bad idea. Do the same with your grandma and so on.’ And because of that his research is cited often and it’s always exciting,” she said.

The idea for Dr. Jacobsen’s dissertation came from her coursework and her corporate experience.

“[In business school,] you take these corporate finance classes and most of the research assumes that managers and CEOs are all homogenous. They’re basically robots. If you give two CEOs the same compensation contract, and the same monitoring by the board of directors and shareholders, they’ll always make the same decisions. Very little research has considered the idea that these CEOs have idiosyncrasies that might affect their decision making,” Dr. Jacobsen said.

“So I thought back to my days in investment banking and working on corporate finance, and my experience that you came across very different personalities in CEOs. Some of these guys had huge egos, whereas others were very cautious—maybe they grew up in the Depression—and others were always thinking about ethical and moral consequences.”

“I started to wonder if these idiosyncrasies mattered in terms of a corporate finance setting. Do investors care about these idiosyncratic incentives? Do they value that information? We talk in finance about things we can incentivize CEOs with, like compensation contracts, which we can monitor and control, but there are characteristics that can’t be controlled that will affect how a CEO makes decisions.”

Dr. Jacobsen looked at CEOs who cancel acquisition deals, or mergers, because they are too expensive. CEOs have incentives to complete these acquisitions, she said, because their pay is directly tied to the size of the firm. Each time a CEO completes a merger, s/he increases the size of the firm and thus the CEO’s compensation.

“So, it tells us something very valuable about the CEO that is willing to forgo this and cancel a deal because it’s bad for shareholders. [Looking at these canceled deals] allows me to disentangle one very specific idiosyncratic incentive, which I call ‘restraint’ or ‘discipline.’” A CEO shows ‘restraint’ by canceling a deal, she said.

To understand if the market values this characteristic she does two tests.

First, Dr. Jacobsen looks at the capital market response, or how the stock market reacts to the announcement of the cancellation. She found a significant increase in the firm's share price in the days surrounding the cancellation announcement.

Second, she looks at the labor market perspective. Dr. Jacobsen found that CEOs who show ‘restraint’ have better career prospects. These CEOs are significantly less likely to be fired and more likely to move onto better jobs, meaning they are more likely to become CEOs at bigger public firms.

Bad CEOs would have done the deal even if it was expensive, Dr. Jacobsen said.

“I think it’s interesting because in the last ten years everyone has been seeing these revelations of CEOs committing fraud, or going to jail or paying themselves too much. So this is a nice revelation of a CEO doing something good, something right,” she said.

She begins as an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University this month.

Media Contacts:
Erika Lee, Director of Communications, The University Graduate School, ebigalee@indiana.edu
Anna Saraceno, The IU Graduate and Professional Student Organization, gpso@indiana.edu

The Graduate and Professional Student Organization and the University Graduate School would like to congratulate Stacey Jacobsen on receiving the GPSO/UGS Recognition Award. Students selected for this award were nominated by a faculty member from within their department, and selected by the GPSO and UGS for excellence in their graduate studies at Indiana University.

McNair Scholars Students Receive Awards and Visit from Program Founder Carl McNair

2011-05-11T12:07:00.002-04:00

McNair Scholars Class of 2011 with Director Cathi Eagan (right), Dean of the University Graduate School James C. Wimbush (center, back), and Program Founder Carl McNair (center, front).

Graduating seniors in the Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program were honored at the Annual Graduate Student Awards Reception on April 28, 2011. Many received awards for not only their participation in this nationally recognized program, but also for their stellar academic achievements.

“It was a wonderful year,” Director Cathi Eagan said. “All of our graduating students were accepted into graduate programs, and many have received amazing funding opportunities to further their studies.”

This year graduate students Esther Uduehi and Isak Nti Asare received the McNair Scholar of the Year Award. Esther will be studying at Oxford University in England next year on a Rhodes Scholarship and Isak recently received the Pickering Graduate Foreign Affairs Award, funded by the Woodrow Wilson National Foundation.

The McNair Director’s Award, an award for a student who went above and beyond the guidelines of the McNair Scholars Program, went to Jaycee Bingham. Jaycee applied for the most large, external fellowships this year.

“Applying for grants like with the Ford Foundation is a huge amount of work,” Eagan said, “and Jaycee applied for five of these.”

Also attending was Carl McNair, brother of Ronald E. McNair, namesake of the program, and President of the McNair Foundation, who flew in just for the event.
“This was the same day he was supposed to fly down to see the NASA space shuttle lift off the next day. He told NASA that he had a prior commitment, so they arranged to have him fly back out the next morning at 6am so he could make it in time for the launch,” Eagan said. “That’s how dedicated he is to these students and this program.”

The goal of the Ronald E. McNair Scholars program is to prepare low-income, first-generation, and minority undergraduates for graduate study at the doctoral level. The program began with 14 programs in 1987, and it now comprises 200 programs across the country and in Puerto Rico, including four McNair Programs in Indiana. McNair Scholars is part of TRIO, a group of federally-funded college opportunity programs, administered by the U.S. Department of Education.

McNair Scholars Class of 2011

Adrienne Anderson, graduating with a B.A. in Psychology. Accepted to graduate program in Clinical Psychology at the University of Dayton with funding.

Jaycee Bigham, graduating with B.A. in Spanish and Anthropology; certificate in Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Accepted to doctoral program in Cultural Perspective and Comparative Education at the University of California Santa Barbara with funding.

Gregory Ryan Briles, graduating with a B.A. in American Studies and History minor. Plans to apply for doctoral programs in American Studies and American Culture this fall. Working with Americorp the coming year.

Robin Coleman, graduating with B.A. in African American and African Diaspora Studies and a minor in Fine Arts (Studio art with concentration in ceramics). Accepted to graduate program in Africana Studies at Cornell University with funding.

Desiree Cossyleon, Graduating with a B.A. in Neuroscience and Spanish with minors in Linguistics and Chemistry. Desiree is a Wells Scholar and a Lugar Scholar Recipient. Desiree applied and was accepted into several neuroscience graduate programs, but she decided to accept a teaching post with Teach for America. After Teach for America, Desiree will be pursuing a Ph.D. in neuroscience.

Magortu Emmanuel, graduating with a B.A. in Biology and African American and African Diaspora Studies with minors in Public Health and Chemistry. Accepted to the graduate program in public health at Tulane University in Louisiana.

Shannon Utam Moses, graduating with B.S. in Kinesiology and Dance with a focus in the Anthropology of Dance. Accepted into the one-year graduate program of Performance Studies , with $40,000 funding, at New York University’s Tisch School, the #1 ranked school in the world for performance studies.

Isak Nti Asare, a Wells Scholar, graduating with a B.A. in Political Science and Linguistics and a minor in African Languages. Accepted to graduate program in Development Studies at the University of Oxford in England. 2011 Elvis J. Stahr Distinguished Senior Award. Finalist for the 2011 Rhodes Fellowship. Named the 2011 Thomas R. Pickering Graduate Foreign Affairs Fellowship recipient (The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), a fellowship worth $44,000/year for graduate study.

Kimberly Sanders, an Adam Herbert Presidential Scholar, is graduating with a B.A. in Sociology and African American and African Diaspora Studies. Accepted to the graduate program in African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University with funding.

Kayla Scroggins, graduating with a B.A. in Anthropology with a minor in History. Accepted to the graduate program in History at the University of North Carolina Wilmington with funding.

Nathaniel Shannon, graduating with a B.A. in Psychology and a minor in Neuroscience. Accepted to the doctoral program in the Cognitive Division of the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago with funding.

Nathen Steininger, graduating with a B.A. in East Asian Languages and Cultures, Religious Studies, and Sociology and a minor in Psychology. Accepted to the graduate program in the School of Social Work at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis.

Esther Uduehi, Wells Scholar, graduating with a B.S. in Biochemistry and Mathematics. Accepted to the graduate program in Biochemistry at the University of Oxford in England. While at IUB, Esther has been named a Richard G. Lugar Scholar, received the Kenneth R.R. Gros Louis Scholarship and the Elvis J. Stahr Distinguished Senior Award, and has served as Vice President of IU’s Board of Aeons. Named a 2011 Rhodes Fellow.

Alexandria White, graduating with a B.A. in Sociology. Accepted to the graduate program in Student Affairs Administration in Higher Education at Ball State University with funding.

Ariana Zarate, graduating with a B.S. in Public Health. Accepted to the graduate programs in public health at Indiana University Bloomington and Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis with funding.

IDS: Graduate applicants level off as economy recovers

2011-05-10T21:44:00.000-04:00

http://www.idsnews.com/news/story.aspx?id=81509

The recent economic recession increased the number of students who applied to IU graduate schools, but the continued recovery is beginning to reverse that trend.

Nationally, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for March 2011 at 8.8 percent; down from a high of 10.1 percent in October 2009.

Some of IU’s graduate programs are beginning to show a leveling off of applicants for this year as a result.

“With the economy of 2008 and 2009, nationally more people applied — to law school — because they couldn’t get jobs and maybe if they had thought about going to law school, they accelerated their decision and applied,” Ken Turchi, assistant dean for communications and marketing for the Maurer School of Law said. “We could be seeing a reversal of that.”

To date, Maurer School of Law is on track to receive fewer applications for admission than in years past, he said.

The assistant dean of admissions at the Maurer School of Law, Frank Motley, said that while the quantity of applications went down in 2011, the quality went up. Many of the applicants had higher LSAT scores and GPAs.

A poor job market usually encourages people to return to or stay in school, Erika Lee, director of communications for the IU Graduate School said.

Because of the economic recovery currently underway, students will often return to school in order to qualify for more specialized employment, Lee said.

-- J. Edward Calabro

IU senior Isak Osagyefo Nti Asare selected for Pickering Graduate Foreign Affairs Fellowship

2011-05-10T10:40:00.000-04:00

Isak Osagyefo Nti Asare

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 9, 2011

http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/18518.html

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- At just 22, recent Indiana University graduate Isak Osagyefo Nti Asare already has lived and studied in more countries than most people visit in a lifetime.

He graduated with highest distinction from IU's College of Arts and Sciences on Saturday with a Bachelor of Arts degree and majors in political science and linguistics, a minor in African languages (Swahili and Akan) and an undergraduate certificate in African Studies.

Nti Asare learned last week that he also has been selected for a Thomas R. Pickering Graduate Foreign Affairs Fellowship, which provides funding to participants as they prepare academically and professionally to enter the U.S. Department of State Foreign Service. He will receive $40,000 for each of the two years of his graduate program, as well as stipends for participation in domestic summer internships that follow each academic year.

"Isak's biography and record of accomplishments already read like that of a distinguished ambassador, so it is fitting he has won a Pickering Fellowship," said IU Bloomington Hutton Honors College Dean Matt Auer. "Everyone at the Hutton Honors College is ecstatic for Isak."

Born in Stockholm, Sweden, Nti Asare has lived and studied in Dubai and Sharjah (both in the United Arab Emirates), Estonia, Mexico, Azerbaijan and Ghana. He also speaks five languages -- one of the reasons IU has been such an ideal fit.

"I knew I wanted to do African studies, and the strength of the African languages program here was a definite plus -- the foreign languages in general at IU are impressive," Nti Asare said. "I don't know of any other school that offers as many languages, and at such a high level, as IU."

Nti Asare attended high school in Laramie, Wyo., and fell in love with the IU Bloomington campus on a senior year swimming recruiting trip.

"It was the first recruiting trip I went on, and then all the others just didn't seem right," he said. "I think Herman B Wells once said that Indiana was always a place where you could 'feel imaginative,' and that was very much the case. I came here and felt at home. I felt imaginative, like I could do anything I wanted to do here."

One of Nti Asare's mentors is Professor A.B. Assensoh, director of graduate studies and admissions for IU Bloomington's Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies. Assensoh said that along with many other faculty members, he and his wife, Office for Women's Affairs Dean Yvette M. Alex-Assensoh, are very proud of "young Isak."

A.B. Assensoh impressed upon his mentee the importance of having work published.

"He took that advice so seriously that, even as an undergraduate student at Indiana University, Isak already has published no less than two review essays in refereed journals (produced by IU Press and Brill Academic Press of Europe)," Assensoh said. "(Dean Assensoh) and I expect young Isak Osagyefo Nti Asare to excel and blossom intellectually-cum-academically anywhere that he ends up for graduate or professional studies."

Within the span of this past academic year, Nti Asare acted as treasurer of the African Languages Club (he was previously the president) and was undergraduate outreach coordinator for the African Studies Program. He received the Elvis J. Stahr Distinguished Senior Award; the Outstanding Senior Award and Outstanding Undergraduate Achievement Award (both from the Department of Linguistics) and the Wendell L. Willkie Scholarship for graduating seniors in political science.

He was also named McNair Scholar of the Year, is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and received departmental honors from the political science and linguistics departments for his two distinct thesis projects (one for each major). He is working on A Dictionary of the Susu Language of Guinea along with recently named Beinecke Scholar Kip Hutchins and Professor Samuel G. Obeng, director of the African Studies Program.

"He's really a terrific student, leader and person who will undoubtedly go on to do many significant things beyond IU," said Assistant Professor of Political Science Lauren MacLean."Isak is not only intellectually engaged and academically serious, but he also always has a big smile for everyone he meets."

When people talk about Nti Asare, they usually mention his characteristic humility. True to form, the accomplished student said he only agreed to be interviewed to honor his faculty and fellow student mentors.

"I think a seed is only as good as the soil in which it's planted, and I guess a seed is only as good as the tree from which it came, right? Even the best of seeds and the best of soil need a really good gardener," he said.

Nti Asare said that he can look back and clearly see his growth since freshman year. Two overseas trips -- one to Ghana the summer after his freshman year at IU, and one to Tanzania last summer -- were incredible learning experiences. In Tanzania, he worked for a brief time with an NGO that helped AIDS victims.

"They were talking a lot about research and studies, which was impactful to me, because it showed that academic research and the things we're doing at universities make a big difference in the world," he said. "Our studies, our travel, our work, can have an impact. I think that's what ultimately motivated me to want to do a career in international development and international affairs."

Richard S. Melvin Professor of Law Kevin Brown said he expects that one day, Nti Asare's natural leadership abilities and his talent for inspiring confidence in others will make him a significant player in the international scene.

"Isak is more prepared than any student I have ever known to pursue academic interests in issues pertaining to indigenous politics, globalization, processes of democratization, poverty alleviation and the international political economy," Brown said. "He has lived in eight different countries on four different continents. When you talk to Isak, you know that you have met someone who is truly special and destined for future greatness.

"Frankly, in my 24 years as a professor, I have never met a student that I am more confident will play a huge part on the world's stage in tackling the world's most significant problems than Isak," he added.

Next up for Nti Asare: His June wedding to Maria Moore, whom he's known since his sophomore year of high school in Wyoming, and then deciding where to attend graduate school.

IU will always hold a special place in his heart.

"IU is an awesome place," he said. "It is the soil that brings the gardeners -- professors -- and the seeds -- students -- together. When the seed grows, he can only look back and be thankful to the environment which attributed to his growth."

Informatics student awarded National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship

2011-05-10T10:32:00.000-04:00

IU Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing Ph.D. candidate Katie O'Donnell will receive $90,000 in support over three years from the National Science Foundation toward her research on domestic technology design.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 10, 2011

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Katie O'Donnell, a Ph.D. candidate in the human computer interaction design program at Indiana University Bloomington's School of Informatics and Computing, has been awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship worth $90,000 over three years.

O'Donnell will research cross-cultural domestic technology design and will begin her Ph.D. program at the School of Informatics and Computing (SOIC) in the fall. O'Donnell holds a Bachelor of Science in informatics with a minor in psychology and a master's degree in Human Computer Interaction/Design from IU Bloomington.

IU Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing Ph.D. candidate Katie O'Donnell will receive $90,000 in support over three years from the National Science Foundation toward her research on domestic technology design.

The purpose of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program is to help ensure the vitality and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce in the United States. The program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students who are pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees in fields within NSF's mission.

"This is a phenomenal opportunity for Katie," said IU professor Shaowen Bardzell, a faculty member in SOIC's human computer interaction design program and O'Donnell's advisor. "Even at the undergraduate and master's levels she had amassed an impressive record, and now as she enters our Ph.D. program, the sky's the limit for her."

The NSF's graduate fellowship program provides three years of support for the graduate education of individuals who have demonstrated their potential for significant achievements in science and engineering research. The competitive fellowship was awarded to 2,000 students nationwide this year, eight of them to Indiana University.

O'Donnell's research emphasis is domestic technology design. A recipient of the Computing Research Association's Multidisciplinary Research Opportunities for Women award, O'Donnell used the grant to complete her undergraduate thesis on fostering physical engagement for seniors. She has been a member of Women in Informatics and Computing for six years and has served as the communication chair for the organization for two years. She is also the Institutional Voice Chair for the Graduate Informatics Student Association and last summer O'Donnell successfully completed an internship at Oracle, researching and designing collaborative applications.

http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/18529.html

To speak with O'Donnell or for more information please contact Steve Chaplin, Office of University Communications, at 812-856-1896 or stjchap@indiana.edu, or Lisa Herrmann, School of Informatics and Computing, at 812-855-4125 or ljherrma@indiana.edu.

Open position: School of Informatics and Computing seeking grad student researcher

2011-05-04T10:37:00.000-04:00

Dear Graduate Students:

We are seeking a highly motivated graduate student RA/intern, or a researcher to participate in a new collaborative project between the School of Informatics and Computing, the Center for Law, Ethics, and Applied Research in Health Information, the Regenstrief Institute, and the IU School of Medicine.

The project team seeks to make breakthrough progress in technology to enable nationwide health information exchanges. The project focuses on enabling providers and patients to search for and access individual health information through a secure, web-based connection. In particular, the IU-B portion of the project focuses on designing an interface for patients to allow privacy-preserving granular control over personal health information.

The primary activities will include conducting interviews with patients, coordinating the collection of patient data, analyzing interview data, planning study protocols, participating in team meetings, and preparing reports of study findings. Additional responsibilities may include and disseminating results via publications and conference presentations, collaborating with a visual designer to design a user interface for sharing patient health information, and/or conducting usability testing.

This is a 20 hour per week position starting immediately, with the option to extend to Fall and/or Spring semester.

Qualifications

BS or BA in Informatics, Computer Science, Psychology, or a related field (MS or PhD preferred) • Knowledge and/or experience in any of the following:

Structured interview
Card sort
Focus group
User-centered design
Human factors methods
User evaluation

Excellent interpersonal communication skills and collaboration skills (required to work with hospital staff and patients)
Ability to work independently Desirable Attributes • Experience working on a multi-disciplinary team • IRB certification
Drivers license
Use of car (you would be reimbursed for all work-related travel)
Strong publication history

Interested applicants should send their CV and a short email cover letter highlighting relevant experience to: caine@indiana.edu with “Application for Summer RA” in the subject line. Those with an interest in health informatics, privacy, human factors and/or an interest in attending medical school are strongly encouraged to apply. Hiring will proceed on a rolling basis, so early application is encouraged.

Contact
Kelly Caine, Ph.D.
Principal Research Scientist
School of Informatics and Computing
Center for Law, Ethics, and Applied Research in Health Information
Indiana University
caine@indiana.edu

Santosh Jain Endowed Memorial Scholarship Awarded to IU Graduate Student Wasantha Jayawardene

2011-05-03T14:56:00.005-04:00

(from the left) Santosh Jain's son; Wasantha Jayawardene, 2011 award winner;
Mr. Chaman Jain, a senior lecturer in SPEA and husband of the late Santosh Jain Endowed; Ahmed YoussefAgha, assistant professor in applied health sciences

Santosh Jain Endowed Memorial Scholarship
Wasantha Jayawardene, 2011 Award Winner
Doctoral candidate in Health Behavior
Department of Applied Health Science

IU Doctoral student Wasantha Jayawardene from the Department of Applied Health Science is the winner of the first ever Santosh Jain Endowed Memorial Scholarship.

The $5,000 annual award offers financial support to a current international graduate student who has demonstrated commitment to service and education and plans to pursue a service-oriented career. The recipient will possess a track record of service to under-served or rural communities, humanitarian causes, or educational organizations in activities that support an improvement in the lives and opportunities to those in impoverished communities.

Award winner Jayawardene fits that description well. His advisers describe his as having a strong passion for serving disadvantaged populations, especially in terms of access to health care and his research focuses on health promotion of low income social groups and ethnic minorities through school health activities. Jayawardene is dedicated to his research, but he also possesses a background filled with experience working as a medical doctor in a rural hospital, as a medical office in health sector planning, and as a regional epidemiologist at the district level in Sri Lanka. His training is international and he is able to speak English, Russian, Tamil, and Sinhala.

“I strongly believe that our health care systems do not reach the social periphery, effectively utilize the available resources or get the full participation of disadvantaged populations,” Jayawardene said. “It has inflexible procedures and styles, is not people oriented, and overlooks the cultural and social aspects of disease, which ultimately demands more studies and researches to rectify. My ultimate goals are to study unexplored aspects of health issues in disadvantaged populations in order to utilize that knowledge to develop interventions. Gaining knowledge and research experience is an essential step to reach these goals, which is the reason for me to set my heart upon a research and academic career in HPER.”

The scholarship honors the memory of Chaman Jain's wife, who was well known among international graduate students. Chaman Jain, a senior lecturer in SPEA, said he and his children felt very strongly that this is the way to continue her vision to support education.

For more information on the award: http://www.indiana.edu/~grdschl/pdf/Santosh_Jain.pdf

May 2011 Graduate Student of the Month: James Paasche

2011-05-02T10:44:00.002-04:00

James Paasche
Department of Communication and Culture
May 2011

When you meet IU Graduate Student James Paasche you can’t help getting caught up in his enthusiasm for movies and music, but you will also quickly notice that his interests run deeper than a “thumbs-up” review. Paasche wants to know what media means in day-to-day life and what it’s like for average people to be everyday media producers. His path to graduate school as a first generation college student was not exactly straightforward – the typical pipeline of high school to college to graduate school had turns and bends in it. It’s also immediately clear that his life experiences are a bonus in his research, and that he is an important addition to ongoing discourse on amateur media happening in departments like IU’s Communication and Culture.

“I was away from college for eight years being in a band and touring the country. I worked for an interesting group where I taught students with learning disabilities how to read and comprehend what they’ve read,” he said. “But probably the main thing I did was work at record stores and video stores and cinemas. I was trying to count it up, but I think I’ve worked in five different record stores, four different movie theatres and three different video stores.”

“Media and pop culture were an everyday part of my life and at some point I realized that media wasn’t just about a financial transaction. I really started to understand the affective ties people have to media and music and film, and that peaked my interest,” he said.

Paasche finished qualifying exams and is now in the process of writing a prospectus. His dissertation will focus on the amateur media environment in Vietnam in all its various forms, such as film, newsletters, magazines, newspapers, and audio letters made by soldiers and sent home. The idea, he said, is to acknowledge current day interest in amateur media, but to also “give a nod to historical precedence.”

The act of writing a prospectus, he said, is like doing research on his research project and a big part of it is figuring out the scope of his project.

“For example,” he said, “the Vietnam War is my time frame, but I might have an epilogue where I discuss the relevance to the current Iraq/Afghanistan war because there is a huge proliferation of video letters home on YouTube and sites like that because it’s a way for soldiers to communicate with their families back home. I just find it fascinating that such a private thing like a letter could become such a public thing.”

Another reason Paasche wants to focus on the Vietnam War is because he wants to work on a project that incorporates film and not just digital video.

“I want to talk about film stock – the material – which we don’t do much anymore. There are a lot of fantasies about the utopian possibilities of technology, but we don’t really talk about what it means to have that camera in your hand or what it means to have to send that film somewhere to be developed. In many cases, Vietnam soldiers were probably never watching their messages over there – they’re sending them home – so they’re eventually sitting in someone’s garage or attic. What does it mean that someone would create this media then never see it again? It’s different from what current and future film makers do,” he said.

“Every day of working on my prospectus I’m learning new things – like how a lot of film and photographs went missing after being confiscated from dead soldiers, so the surviving films – no one knows who shot it or who the people in it were now. So, this process of preparing for a large research project is about preparing and educating me as well. I’m looking for archives, veterans groups, and other data sources right now, and I’ve started to make contacts on a larger context – like sons of guys who were there and relive those memories through their father’s roles there.”

“I want to incorporate film, but I also want to think about media in a larger context as well because there were a number of newspapers being made by soldiers at the time and many of them are documents of people who are disagreeing with their government at a fundamental level, and these are the people over there fighting for the government. It can be a form of resistance as well. Another example like this is pirate radio broadcasts.”

As Paasche defines the limits for the project and looks for funding, requests IRB approval and works through other hoops that are part of beginning a large research project, he makes sure to find time for the environment that led him to finish college and pursue graduate school in the first place by working a few shifts at Landlocked Music here in Bloomington, Indiana.

I really enjoy the atmosphere in music stores, he said, but “I know now I also want to be more critical of my media practices and I want other people to have that ‘ah-ha’ moment. I want my students to have that moment of not just accepting these things as forms of entertainment but forms of culture that say something about us in a larger sense.”

“That’s really what got me here.”

For the past three years, James Paasche has organized and run Home Movie Day—an annual event that connects the university with the community in a celebration and screening of home movies. (See the press release: http://newsinfo.iu.edu/web/page/normal/15811.html) Home Movie Day is held all over the country, and James took the lead in bringing this important event to Bloomington. He has been able to establish important collaborative connections with the Black Film Center/Archive and the new IU Cinema, helping to assure that IU will continue to host this unique event.

This October, 2011, Home Movie Day will be held at the new IU Cinema. Part of the event this year will be an hour of curated home movies from various IU archives such as from the Kinsey Institute, Black Film Center/Archive, and Fine Arts.

Paasche will also be co-programming City Lights, the classic Hollywood film series, next year for the Department of Communications and Culture and the IU Cinema.

Media Contacts:
Erika Lee, Director of Communications, The University Graduate School, ebigalee@indiana.edu
Angela Jones, The IU Graduate and Professional Student Organization, gpso@indiana.edu

The Graduate and Professional Student Organization and the University Graduate School would like to congratulate James Paasche on receiving the GPSO/UGS Recognition Award. Students selected for this award were nominated by a faculty member from within their department, and selected by the GPSO and UGS for excellence in their graduate studies at Indiana University.

‘Steps Taken’ to support strong system of graduate education

2011-04-29T10:43:00.000-04:00

If you missed it, the IDS has a story on the recent "Steps Taken" report. The report is a follow up on the "Path Forward" report released last year on the future of graduate education in the U.S.

http://www.idsnews.com/news/story.aspx?id=81338&search=wimbush§ion=search

Canadian Studies Grant Program: Opportunity for faculty and doctoral students

2011-04-26T10:17:00.000-04:00

Opportunity for faculty and doctoral students:

The Canadian Government, through the Embassy in Washington, DC and its Consulates throughout the United States, supports research, conferences, teaching, and program activity related to Canada and/or Canada-U.S. relations. The Canadian Studies Grant Program encourages comparative research and teaching, faculty exchanges, student mobility, and collaboration between American and Canadian researchers. We also seek to build stronger ties between American and Canadian universities and colleges.

We are particularly interested in projects that have policy relevance for Canada and Canada-U.S. relations.

Such topics include:

North American economic competitiveness
Energy and environments
Security
Arctic issues

You, your colleagues, and students may be interested in one of the following grant programs:

Faculty Research Grant Program assists individual scholars or teams of scholars in writing an article-length manuscript of publishable quality with a focus on Canada or Canada-U.S. relations. Applications due: November 1, 2011.
http://www.canadainternational.gc.ca/washington/studies-etudes/research-recherche.aspx?lang=eng

Conference Grant Program supports conferences that address important and timely issues about Canada or Canada-U.S. relations. It is designed to assist an institution in holding a conference and publishing the resulting papers and proceedings in a scholarly fashion. Applications due: June 30, 2011.
http://www.canadainternational.gc.ca/washington/studies-etudes/conference.aspx?lang=eng

Doctoral Student Research Award offers doctoral students an opportunity to conduct part of their dissertation research in Canada. The program is intended for students whose dissertations are related in substantial part to the study of Canada. Applications due: December 1, 2011.
http://www.canadainternational.gc.ca/washington/studies-etudes/doctoral-doctorat.aspx?lang=eng

Faculty Enrichment Program provides faculty members an opportunity to develop or update a course with substantial Canadian content that will be offered as part of their regular teaching load. Applications due: December 1, 2011.
http://www.canadainternational.gc.ca/washington/studies-etudes/enrichment-complement.aspx?lang=eng

In 2010-11, the Canadian Studies Grant Program provided support to faculty, researchers, and graduate students at institutions across the U.S. More than 80 projects were funded on a wide range of topics and in many disciplines. Here is a list of recent grant recipients and their projects.

For complete Grant Guidelines and information about our other grant programs, please visit:
http://www.canadainternational.gc.ca/washington/studies-etudes/programs-programmes.aspx?lang=eng

Prospective applicants are encouraged to discuss their interest in the grant program with a Canadian government officer in their area.

We would like to encourage faculty and students to sign up for Canada Watch, a bi-weekly summary of the publications and commentaries from Canadian think tanks and research centers on a wide range of Canadian and Canada-U.S. issues and NewsCan, a weekly summary of news from Canada.

We appreciate your interest in Canadian Studies and thank you for sharing this information about the Canadian Studies Grant Program with your colleagues and students.

Michael Brown
Associate, Research and Academic Relations
Associé, Recherche et relations académiques
Embassy of Canada | Ambassade du Canada
501 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20001
Tel: (202) 682-7727
michael.brown@international.gc.ca

We invite you to visit www.Connect2Canada.com, a virtual network for Canadians and friends of Canada in the United States.

WSJ: U.S. Business Schools Get More Competition From Abroad

2011-04-19T10:37:00.005-04:00

IU Kelley School of Business, Courtesy of Indiana University

By KEVIN HELLIKER

U.S. graduate business schools are losing their iron grip on the thriving market for international M.B.A. students.

At the 25 U.S. graduate-business programs that award the largest numbers of degrees to international students, applications for the 2011 fall semester declined 4%, according to a survey released Tuesday by the Council of Graduate Schools, based in Washington, D.C.

Although international applications to all American business schools rose by 4%, that figure paled in comparison to the 12% growth in international bids to U.S. programs offering degrees in engineering and physical and earth sciences, the survey said.

Business-school deans attribute the relatively sluggish growth to a growing number of high-quality competitors overseas.

"Schools throughout Europe, Asia and Australia have made huge investments in graduate education in general—more specifically, business school," said James Wimbush, an Indiana University dean overseeing several graduate schools, including business.

In other disciplines, international applications to U.S. graduate programs rose 9% in education, 8% in arts and humanities, 8% in life sciences, and 5% in social sciences and psychology, making business the field with the smallest increase.

The trend is evident in separate data from the Graduate Management Admission Council, which administers the GMAT, the most popular entrance exam for graduate programs in business.

GMAC sent less than 78% of its scores to U.S. schools in test-year 2010, ended last June 30, compared with 83% in test-year 2006. During that period, the total number of exams sent jumped to 779,000 from 601,000, according to the GMAC Web site.

In one indication of growing international demand for graduate degrees in business, non-U.S. citizens taking the GMAT outnumbered U.S. citizens for the first time ever in test-year 2009, and did so again in test-year 2010.

Meanwhile, in the Financial Times's most recent rankings of global MBA programs, American schools held 24 of the top 50 spots in 2011, down from 31 in 2007.

World-wide, the number of programs accepting the GMAT has grown to 5,000 from 4,181 five years ago, said Julia Tyler, an executive vice president of GMAC.

A growing percentage of test-takers from India are choosing programs in their own country, Ms. Tyler said, adding that test takers in Western Europe are choosing that region's schools, including the London Business School, which on the latest Financial Times ranking shares the top spot with the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

U.S. business schools aren't the only programs encountering greater competition for overseas students. Of all international students who left their home countries to study, only 20% came to the U.S. in 2008, down from 25% in 2000, said Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools.

"As we sit here today, the U.S. graduate education is the best in the world," she said. "But the future is far from secure."

For U.S. graduate schools in all fields of study, the number of applications for fall 2011 from prospective international students rose 9%, according to the Council of Graduate Schools survey, roughly the same level of growth reported last year.

That includes spikes in applications of 18% from China, 7% from India and 2% from South Korea—the largest three countries of origin for international graduate students in the U.S., the council said.

Write to Kevin Helliker at kevin.helliker@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications
James Wimbush is a dean at Indiana University who oversees several graduate schools, including business. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he was dean of the university's graduate school of business.

Read the original story in the Wall Street Journal

SAA Opening: Evaluating & Improving Financial Literacy among Graduate Assistants

2011-04-15T11:50:00.000-04:00

Application Deadline: June 15, 2011
SAA Start Date: August 1, 2011

University Human Resources is seeking a Graduate Assistant to conduct a two year research and analysis project related to evaluating and improving the level of financial literacy of IU’s Graduate Assistants.

This project is funded by the TIAA-CREF Institute and the target audience would be approximately 4400 IU Graduate Assistants and post-docs (3800 at Bloomington, 600 at IUPUI). Suggested research will involve measuring and analyzing financial literacy that results from education as well as the impact of framing the concept of lifetime savings. This project may include a cross-disciplinary approach with TIAA-CREF Institute fellows from other Institutions including Dartmouth and Boston College.

Successful candidates will have project management experience, education and/or work experience in Finance or a related field, and may be pursuing a graduate degree from the Kelley School of Business or the School of Public and Environmental Affairs. The expectation is that this position will work 15-20 hours per week; remuneration includes a $1,250 monthly stipend ($12,500 annual equivalent over 10 months) and health insurance. This position reports to the Associate Vice President of University Human Resources.

Questions may be directed to April Underwood at UHRS: underwoo@indiana.edu or 812-856-6835. Please send a letter of application, resume and contact information for 3 references to: underwoo@indiana.edu.

Yahoo! internships available

2011-04-15T11:36:00.000-04:00

I am looking for PhD students who are interested in doing internships this
Summer. I have one (possibly two) open position(s) for an internship based
in Santa Clara at Yahoo! Research. In terms of skill sets and interests, I
am looking for folks with mobile/tablet design/development expertise to work
with a team creating some fun interactive, social applications/interactions.
The internship is for up to 3 months.

If you know of anyone who may be interested or if you are interested
yourself, or if you have questions, please drop me a line on
echu@yahoo-inc.com with a CV/resume. Candidates must be enrolled in a PhD
program.

Thanks so much!

--Elizabeth

'Steps Taken' report marks progress in graduate education

2011-04-14T14:04:00.003-04:00

Release from IU Info:
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/18198.html

James C. Wimbush

April 14, 2011

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Indiana University and other institutions of higher education are acting strategically to ensure that graduate education remains a viable option for a growing number of students, said James Wimbush, dean of the University Graduate School.

He addressed the issue upon the release of Steps Taken on The Path Forward, a new report from the Council of Graduate Schools. It details steps that colleges and universities have made to implement the recommendations of The Path Forward: The Future of Graduate Education in the United States, a landmark report issued last year by the Commission on the Future of Graduate Education.

Wimbush was one of three graduate school deans who spoke at the release of the Steps Taken report during a forum on graduate education last week in Washington, D.C.

At Indiana University, he said, "the report motivated us to increase our focus on a number of key areas -- recruitment, completion, and career and professional development -- and we're doing a lot in all of these and other areas, but we gave special attention to completion, and the No. 1 factor that influences it, financial support."

The April 2010 Path Forward report was a result of collaboration by the Council of Graduate Schools and the Educational Testing Service. It called on the federal government, universities and industry to work together to strengthen the future of graduate education.

The new document reviews the impact of The Path Forward one year later and outlines issues and challenges confronting graduate education. It says the report has:

Influenced critical decision processes by helping to shape institutional strategic plans and goals for graduate education programs
Changed institutional priorities by highlighting the importance of graduate education
Created new communication channels, such as catalyzing new online discussions between deans and faculty about graduate education issues
Shaped evaluation metrics and affirmed the commitment of graduate deans to developing and using outcome measures and offering more information to students
Introduced new programs, particularly professional development programs for graduate students.

Wimbush cited the New Academic Directions project at Indiana University, which examined the institution's academic structure to ascertain if it includes the right mix of academic units and programs along with flexibility and efficiency for training future graduate students and undergraduates.

Findings from the Council of Graduate Schools' Ph.D. Completion Project, he said, show that financial support is the top challenge facing graduate students, followed by advising and family support. He said graduate school officials have significant concerns about the number of students who are having difficulty completing their programs because of inadequate financial resources and debt.

IU has established additional graduate fellowships and deans have targeted fund-raising to the support of graduate education, but federal support is also needed, Wimbush said.

"At a time when we need more people to be pursuing graduate education, the federal government should be enhancing support for graduate education and higher education overall," he said. "The Department of Education's proposal to eliminate the in-school interest subsidy for graduate and professional school students is a concern and the graduate community would like to work with policymakers on ways to address this."

Speakers at last week's forum also included U.S. Rep. Tim Bishop of New York, Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia, Under Secretary of Education Martha Kantor and officials from Educational Testing Service, IBM and IBM Foundation, and Batelle Memorial Institute. The Steps Taken report can be seen at http://www.cgsnet.org/portals/0/pdf/GR_R_CFGEStepsTaken.pdf.

The IU Graduate and Professional Student Organization (GPSO) announces 2011 Research Award winners

2011-04-11T15:33:00.000-04:00

THE IU GRADUATE AND PROFESSIONAL STUDENT ORGANIZATION (GPSO) ANNOUNCES
2011 Research Award Winners

Each year the GPSO aids graduate students by providing financial support for research projects. Recipients are selected through a competitive, merit-based process in which an independent panel of fellow graduate and professional students review and assess anonymous applications. The GPSO would like to congratulate the following award recipients:

2011 GPSO Research Award Winners:
Amy Gray, Geography
Jeremy Young, History
Jessica Hite, Biology
Lyra Spang, Anthropology
Ryan Brasher, Political Science
Cody Behles, Central Eurasian Studies

The Graduate and Professional Student Organization is the formally recognized government for graduate and professional students at Indiana University Bloomington. More information about GPSO Research Awards can be found at http://www.iu.edu/~gpso/Research-Grants.php.

Released April 11th, 2011

Contact Information:
Angela Jones, GPSO Communications Coordinator
gpso@indidana.edu
803 8th St , Bloomington, IN 47408
www.iu.edu/~gpso

"Steps Taken on the Path Forward" highlights impact of landmark report

2011-04-07T14:25:00.002-04:00

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

University Graduate School Dean James C. Wimbush

Washington, D.C. – On Tuesday, April 5, 2011, policymakers, business leaders, and higher education stakeholders shared their perspectives on the importance of graduate education to U.S. innovation and competitiveness and discussed the impact of last year’s landmark report “The Path Forward: The Future of Graduate Education in the United States.”

The Path Forward report, a joint effort of the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) and Educational Testing Service (ETS), called on the federal government, universities and industry to work together to ensure that graduate education remains a viable option for a growing number of students.

The report is produced by the Commission on the Future of Graduate Education, an 18-member group made up of university and industry leaders. James Wimbush, dean of the University Graduate School at Indiana University, is one of seven graduate school deans to serve on the commission.

At this year’s forum, a new paper “Steps Taken on the Path Forward” was released; the document reviews the impact of The Path Forward one year later and outlines issues and challenges confronting graduate education now and into the future. On campuses, the report has:

Influenced critical decision processes by helping to shape institutional strategic plans and goals for graduate education programs;
Changed institutional priorities by highlighting the importance of graduate education, the report resulted in making graduate fellowships the top priority for one institution’s fundraising;
Created new communication channels, such as catalyzing new online discussions between deans and faculty about graduate education issues and development of a video aimed at clarifying career pathways for students;
Shaped evaluation metrics and affirming the commitment of graduate deans to developing and using outcome measures and offering more information to prospective and current students;

Introduced new programs, particularly professional development programs for graduate students.

“The report’s findings and recommendations have had an impact on a number of fronts - from federal policy to new university based strategic directions. They have facilitated a national conversation about the role and value of graduate education and its centrality to our quality of life.” said Debra Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools. “While challenges remain, stakeholders across the country have taken the report’s findings to heart and are working to strengthen the graduate education enterprise,” she added.

Among the featured speakers were several policymakers as well as business leaders and graduate deans. Kurt Landgraf, President and CEO of ETS, Stan Litow, VP of Corporate Citizenship & Corporate Affairs, IBM and President of IBM's Foundation, and Ronald Townsend, Executive VP for Global Laboratory Operations, Battelle Memorial Institute, discussed the importance of human talent to innovation and competitiveness.

A panel of graduate deans followed, made up of Robert Augustine, Dean of the Graduate School, Eastern Illinois University; Lisa Tedesco, Vice Provost & Dean, Laney Graduate School, Emory University; and James Wimbush, Dean, The University Graduate School, Indiana University. Each dean shared examples of the ways they used the report at the local and state level.

The event underscored the role of graduate education in maintaining and enhancing U.S. competitiveness and the need to support this strategic national asset.

About The Path Forward report

The report, The Path Forward: The Future of Graduate Education in the United States, was guided by the Commission on the Future of Graduate Education ─ a group jointly formed by the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) and Educational Testing Service (ETS) in 2009 to study how graduate education can meet the challenges of the 21st century. The Commission is comprised of 18 university presidents and chancellors, provosts, graduate school deans, corporate leaders and higher education scholars. The report and additional information is available at www.fgereport.org.

Media Contact: Belle Woods / (202) 223-3791 / bwoods@cgs.nche.edu
UGS Contact: Erika Lee / (812) 856-3744 / ebigalee@indiana.edu

###

The Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) is an organization of over 500 institutions of higher education in the United States and Canada engaged in graduate education, research, and the preparation of candidates for advanced degrees. Among U.S. institutions, CGS members award 93% of the doctoral degrees and 76% of the master’s degrees.* The organization’s mission is to improve and advance graduate education, which it accomplishes through advocacy in the federal policy arena, research, and the development and dissemination of best practices.

* Based on data from the 2009 CGS/GRE Survey of Graduate Enrollment and Degrees

Associate Dean David Daleke to join leadership of the Midwestern Association of Graduate Schools (MAGS)

2011-04-05T14:15:00.001-04:00

University Graduate School Associate Dean David Daleke

Associate Dean David Daleke of the University Graduate School is the new Secretary/Treasurer for the Midwestern Association of Graduate Schools (MAGS). He will begin his three-year term in 2011-12.

As Secretary/Treasurer, Dean Daleke’s primarily responsibilities will be the collection of member dues and organizing logistics for the annual meeting held each spring. Dean Daleke has also served on the new MAGS Teaching Award committee, which created a new award for teaching assistants (one for a masters and one for a doctoral student) and mounted the first competition.

The University Graduate School regularly connects Indiana University with regional and national grad school organizations to further promote and support excellence in graduate education.

"I am happy to help MAGS fulfill its mission of promoting excellence in graduate education in our region. The work of this organization, and especially the programs offered at the annual meeting of the association, is a great benefit to the graduate programs in the diverse schools that make up MAGS," Dean Daleke said.

MAGS (http://www.mags-net.org/) is a regional affiliate of the national Council of Graduate Schools. Its member colleges and universities are accredited institutions of higher education in the central U.S. offering graduate programs leading to masters, specialist, and doctorate degrees. Areas of active discussion and consideration have recently included the future of graduate education, graduate education funding, program assessment and accountability, as well as attrition, distance education, and administrative and instructional methodologies.

Four Department of English grads to share career paths at panel discussion April 13

2011-04-04T12:12:00.001-04:00

April 4, 2011

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- So, what can you do with an English degree?

Four recent graduates of Indiana University's Department of English will return to campus Wednesday, April 13, for a 5 p.m. panel discussion about their current careers. This free, open-to-the-public discussion will take place at the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center, room A201.

The discussion, titled "Working with Public and Professional Writing: What Four Recent English Graduates are Doing with Their Degrees," was arranged by IU Assistant Professor of English Dana Anderson, coordinator for the department's Professional Writing program.

"They will discuss the different professional opportunities they've been able to pursue given their training in English and professional writing," Anderson said.

"Even in these difficult economic times, these students have managed to find different kinds of successes with their English degrees, and it will be engaging to hear the counsel they might have about life after graduation."

Participating alums are:

Kyle Kartz, a freelance writer;
Nicholas Parks, language arts and special education teacher at Imagine Life Sciences Academy East in Indianapolis;
Sara Richart, a student in University of Cincinnati's Accelerated Pathways Graduate Nursing Program; and
Rachael Tunick, human capital consultant for Deloitte Consulting, LLP.

The alums will discuss their current pursuits in the world beyond academics and the ways in which their training in English prepared them for these opportunities.

Anderson hopes to start a series with perhaps one panel per semester if this program is successful.

Light refreshments will be provided. Current and prospective English majors are especially encouraged to participate.

For more information on the IU Department of English, see http://www.indiana.edu/~engweb/index.shtml.

Call for Applications for the Emissaries for Graduate Student Diversity Program 2011-12

2011-04-04T12:07:00.003-04:00

Being an Emissary for Graduate Student Diversity means helping others in the graduate school process, being available as a resource on graduate student life, and representing the strengths and diversity of IU to potential graduate students.

Emissaries are current IU graduate students from a variety of disciplines chosen to represent IU by the University Graduate School. Among other duties, these students produce a blog on student life (http://grademissaries.blogspot.com/), answer questions about life as a graduate student in Bloomington (http://graduate.indiana.edu/emissaries-profiles.php), and offer campus tours to visiting prospective graduate students (http://www.indiana.edu/~grdschl/tours.php).

Interested? Here are the details, including how you apply:

Basic Information
Duration: Fall 2011; Spring 2012; and, Summer 2012 (optional)
Position Open to: all full-time IUB masters and PhD students
Compensation: $500 stipend. Optional: Travel funding and/or $250 summer stipend.
Hours per month: no less than six hours
Sponsor Department: University Graduate School
Number of positions: ten
Application Deadline: Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Website: http://graduate.indiana.edu/emissaries.php

Required Application Materials
To be considered, please complete the following:

An online data form (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/M8LMJ7L) must be submitted by April 19.
A curriculum vitae/resume must be emailed to agep@indiana.edu by April 19.
A one-page essay about past experience with similar initiatives, diversity-building efforts, cultural competency, community involvement or leadership skills must be emailed to agep@indiana.edu by April 19.
A face to face interview is required.

Once selected, emissaries will sign a contract which certifies the understanding of program requirements, expectations and the basis upon which compensation will be received.

Additional Information
Purpose of program: Emissaries for Graduate Student Diversity serve as first contacts and initial resources for prospective graduate students, in addition to working and engaging in dialogue with graduate programs, departments, the University Graduate School and the Graduate and Professional Student Organization (GPSO).

Program Description: Graduate student emissaries will participate in information sessions, student panels, and new graduate student orientation. Graduate student emissaries will attend monthly meetings each semester with other graduate student emissaries. Meetings will be held with University Graduate School staff, and others interested in graduate recruitment activities.

The program will begin with a required session on Monday, May 2, 2011 and will officially begin the week before classes begin in August 2011 and conclude May 2011. Summer duties may be included.

Essential Functions: Graduate student emissaries promote peer connections between individuals interested in masters and PhD programs, especially in science, technology, mathematics (STM) disciplines, and current IUB graduate students. Graduate student emissaries serve as community-building liaisons between graduate studies and the graduate student body at IUB. Through e-mail, web logs, video blogs, and conversational video on Connect and VYou, graduate student emissaries answer non-academic questions about graduate student life at IUB, Bloomington and other recruitment related questions to prospective graduate student applicants.

Graduate students are required to submit a monthly progress report about their contacts with potential students as well as other recruitment activities to the University Graduate School.

Required qualifications: Applicants must be full-time graduate students in a masters or PhD program at IUB, be in good academic standing, and demonstrate involvement in program, departmental, university or community organizations. Preference will be given to graduate students who are involved in diversity-building activities and programming.

Compensation: Graduate student emissaries will receive a $500 research/travel award for the academic year. In addition, graduate student emissaries who conduct four 1-hour tours to prospective graduate students will also receive funding to recruit at their undergraduate institution or conduct a job talk. Summer duties will receive an additional $250 award.

Questions: If you have any questions regarding the Emissaries for Graduate Student Diversity Program, please feel free to contact Dr. Yolanda Trevino at agep@indiana.edu.

Grad Students: Opportunity to become a member of the IUSA Funding Board

2011-04-04T11:48:00.000-04:00

Dear graduate students,

The IUSA Funding Board is currently seeking board members for next year. This board is responsible for allocating the student activities fees we pay each semester to student organization initiatives. Funding Board represents the voice of all students across campus and needs graduate student representation. There are many graduate student organizations on campus who request and receive funds from IUSA Funding Board; as such, having active graduate students on the board to advocate for our symposia and conferences, professional development, and other educational events is quite important.

The board is comprised of 11 regular voting members and 4 alternates and meets for 2-3 hours (beginning at 7pm) on Wednesday evenings during the semester. If you are interested in learning more about student activities and student self-governance or want to participate in the political processes of your campus, please read below and apply!

Forward to your grad program list-servs!

Thanks for your consideration,

Tracy Teel
HESA Master’s Class of 2012
Indiana University Bloomington
-------------------------------

Interested in becoming more "in the know" about what is happening on campus? Want to serve the IU student body? Do you have a passion for student organization programming?

Apply to be a member of next year's IUSA Funding Board--or one of its two Co-Directors! Applications are currently on the IUSA website: http://iusa.indiana.edu/

The IUSA Funding Board meets weekly to decide on funding allocations for several of IU-Bloomington's 700+ student organizations. The time commitment is 3+ hours per week. With a $350,000+ budget, the Funding Board funds more than 200 student organizations each year, helping to bring student organizations' initiatives to fruition. The Co-Director role requires a significantly greater time commitment (12+ hours per week). Please contact iusaaid@indiana.edu if you have questions about either role.

Applications for Board Members are due Friday, April 8th.
Applications for the Co-Director Position are due Wednesday, April 6th.

Graduate Student of the Month: Nicole Willock

2011-04-01T11:57:00.003-04:00

Nicole Willock
Religious Studies and Central Eurasian Studies
April 2011

When Nicole Willock was 18, she didn’t know that studying Chinese would change her life. Currently a graduate student in Religious Studies and Central Eurasian Studies at IU, Willock said her desire to research Tibetan culture began when she was studying abroad as a young adult.

“It’s a passion for me to study and I think as a grad student you have to have that passion and tenacity to keep going. An important part of where that comes from is my own personal experiences studying abroad,” said Willock.

Her adventures began when Willock traveled to China to study Chinese at Sichuan University and film at the Beijing film academy. She also visited Tibet for three months and that experience in particular motivated Willock to want to understand Tibet’s place in China and how those diverse cultures interact.

After a year and a half in China, she began a Master’s degree program with a major in Chinese literature and a minor in Tibetan language at Hamburg University in Germany. She also spent time teaching English as a second language for the university and various language companies.

“At the time, I knew I loved to teach and in particular, to teach about China, but it was hard to marry those two in Germany,” she said. “Up to that point, I was ambivalent about being a professor, but I knew I wanted to study Tibet and the best place to study Tibetan is IU; it has one of the best departments in the country. My advisor Dr. Elliot Sperling speaks Tibetan and uses both Tibetan and Chinese language source materials. He’s one of only a few people who can do that.” She also works closely with Dr. Gendun Rabsal from the IU Department of Central Eurasian Studies, who was instrumental in helping Willock select source materials and the subject of her dissertation.

The religious studies part of her doctoral work came from her deep interest in intellectual history. Willock said she likes understanding how people think, and in Tibetan society, those intellectuals tended to be religious figures. Taking classes in religious studies gave Willock the foundation she needed to approach her doctoral research.

“I love Chinese culture and Tibetan history and sometimes it’s a clash and sometimes it’s harmonious. The paradoxes have driven me to figure that out and it still does. I have friends there, both Tibetan and Chinese, and those personal connections and experiences have driven my work,” Willock said.

Willock’s work on Tibet is hagiographical, she said, meaning she studies the lives of saints. “Hagio” means saints or holy people, and “graphy” essentially means to study. Her dissertation takes a multidisciplinary approach to the life and writings of a Tibetan Buddhist scholar and monk named Tseten Zhabdrung Jigme Rigpe Lodro (1910-1985). Tseten Zhabdrung is interesting as an intellectual figure, Willock said, because he was well respected by both Tibetans and Chinese.

In 2008, Willock travelled to China and Tibet for field research on a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. Based at Qinghai Nationalities University (in Xining, Qinghai Province), she traveled to six monasteries where Tseten Zhabdrung had resided. She also interviewed former students from when he taught classes at secular universities, several of whom now have important intellectual positions in Tibet today as deans, research scholars, writers and editors.

This semester, Willock is revising her dissertation while teaching a course on the politics of religion in modern China at the University of Boulder in Colorado. She plans to defend this summer and graduate in August.

Fluent in German, Tibetan, Chinese, Willock has received a number of awards including the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation. She has presented her research in the US, Canada and Europe and currently holds her the Department of Religious Studies’ Dissertation Fellowship. Additionally, Willock is the only graduate student participating in a five-year seminar on Tibetan literature taking place in the American Academy of Religion at the University of Virginia. The seminar focuses on how Tibetan literature is seen in the academy and in general.

Media Contacts:
Erika Lee, Director of Communications, The University Graduate School, ebigalee@indiana.edu
Angela Jones, The IU Graduate and Professional Student Organization, gpso@indiana.edu

The Graduate and Professional Student Organization and the University Graduate School would like to congratulate Nicole Willock on receiving the GPSO/UGS Recognition Award. Students selected for this award were nominated by a faculty member from within their department, and selected by the GPSO and UGS for excellence in their graduate studies at Indiana University.

Responsible Conduct of Research Series: Authorship Workshop

2011-03-30T14:43:00.002-04:00

Note: This workshop is for IU graduate students and postdocs.

The University Graduate School, Poynter Center and the Office of Research Ethics, Education and Policy (REEP) are pleased to announce an educational session of the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) Educational Program - Authorship.

This series is designed to introduce and explore the principles and practices of RCR. RCR constitutes the integration of research ethics, best practices, and adherence to professional and regulatory standards.

Responsible Conduct of Research Series: Authorship Workshop

April 6, 2011
4 - 5:30 pm
Office of Research Administration Building, 509 E 3rd St, Room 050

Presenters:

Dr. Caroline Chick-Jarrold, Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Chemistry

Dr. Thomas Doak, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Biology

Eric Cesar Morales, Graduate Student, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology

TO REGISTER http://researchadmin.iu.edu/REEP/reep_sessions.html

The Course Title is Responsible Conduct of Research Series - Bloomington. The Class is EE1920110406.

Second Annual Hoosier to Hoosier (H2H) Community Sale, August 20, 2011

2011-03-29T16:05:00.000-04:00

Hoosier to Hoosier (H2H) Community Sale is a reuse program that aims 1) to divert reusable items from the landfill during student move-out, 2) to prevent additional resource consumption by selling collected items to students and community members in order 3) to raise funds for local charities and other organizations. The program allows students to donate reusable items, and help out their neighbors in need at the same time.

Sat, Aug 20, 2011
Gladstein Fieldhouse, IU Campus
7:30am – 3:00pm

The second annual H2H Community Sale will take place from 7:30am – 3pm on Saturday, August 20, 2011, at the Gladstein Fieldhouse on the IU Campus. Students and community members are invited to participate in the sale by donating reusable items, volunteering, or attending the sale. H2H accepts donations of furniture, housewares, clothes, office supplies, operational small appliances, and electronics. Collection begins with a May 5 drop-off day at Gladstein Fieldhouse, near Assembly Hall on IU campus. Collection is conducted at IU dormitories as well as participating apartments and rental housing. Pickups are available upon request.

In its inaugural year in 2010, Hoosier to Hoosier raised nearly $10,000 for United Way and Habitat for Humanity, and approximately 900 people attended, including students, Bloomington residents, and residents from surrounding communities. Over 100 volunteers contributed hours on sale day, and countless others volunteered throughout the summer in sale preparations. The H2H effort intercepted reusable items from IU’s 11 dorms, two Greek houses, and roughly four apartment complexes. In addition, individuals donated items from other off-campus locations, either by dropping items off at the stadium or arranging for a pick-up. In total, the volume intercepted was equivalent to roughly five full semi-trailers.

Beyond just the immediate impact on waste reduction, the H2H effort has other important implications. First, it conserves the energy required to manufacture, transport, and dispose of manufactured goods. Second, it enhances community aesthetics by reducing the amount of waste that appears curbside. Third, it helps project a message to incoming students and all residents about Bloomington’s values. Instead of being greeted by piles of discarded but still usable items upon their arrival, incoming students are sent a clear message that Bloomington is a city that values its resources and strives for sustainability.

H2H is a partnership between the City of Bloomington’s Departments of Economic & Sustainable Development and Community & Family Resources; Habitat for Humanity; IU Athletics; the IU Offices of Sustainability and Residential Programs & Services; and United Way. Numerous local businesses also play a role. Aside from a small percentage set aside for administrative costs associated with the sale the following year, all proceeds from the sale will benefit local organizations.

For more information or volunteer registration, visit www.indiana.edu/~h2h or email h2h@indiana.edu.

Upcoming seminar for IU faculty and staff on the GRE® revised General Test and TOEFL® iBT

2011-03-27T22:44:00.003-04:00

Please join us to hear the latest information on the GRE® revised General Test, TOEFL® internet-based test (TOEFL® iBT™), and the ETS PPI® when members of ETS’s Client Relations Team visit Indiana University. We look forward to seeing you there and invite you to forward this invitation to a colleague.

GRE® revised General Test and TOEFL® iBT Seminar
Date: Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Time: 10:30 am
Location: Indiana Memorial Union, Sassafras Room

OR

Time: 2:00 pm
Location: Indiana Memorial Union, Walnut Room

OR

Time: 4:00 pm
Location: Indiana Memorial Union, Walnut Room

Topics to be covered include:

GRE® revised General Test – launching in 2011
GRE Tools for Success, including the ETS PPI® and the GRE® Search Service
The TOEFL Test Difference and New Developments
Using TOEFL® iBT Scores in the Admissions Process

To attend, please send an email to TOEFLScoreUser@ets.org with your name, title, department, and email address. Please put “Indiana University - Bloomington” in the subject line.

Faculty, program directors, admissions officers (undergraduate and graduate) and staff are welcome to attend.

We think the following sessions will be of the most interest to the following folks:

GRE - graduate faculty, graduate advisors, deans, graduate admissions
TOEFL – undergraduate admissions, international admissions, international student advisers

The Client Relations Team
Educational Testing Service
Princeton, NJ 08541
Phone: 609-683-2011

The new GRE: What you need to know

2011-03-24T13:16:00.000-04:00

By Michael Auslen | IDS
Mar. 24, 2011

http://www.idsnews.com/news/story.aspx?id=80549

The Graduate Record Examination, required by most institutions for admission to graduate school programs, will undergo significant changes beginning Aug. 1.

Currently, the GRE consists of a general test and a series of subject tests. Only the general test will be affected by the changes.

“The test will be much more user-friendly,” said James Wimbush, dean of the University Graduate School and incoming chair of the GRE Board of Directors. “The test will measure the qualities much better for graduate school.”

Wimbush said Educational Testing Service, the company that administers the GRE, looked at years of testing data and spoke with graduate programs about the skills they think are most essential for graduate students before making changes to the test.

“Graduate programs are very keen on students’ analytical abilities and their ability to comprehend,” Wimbush said.

TEST FORMAT
The new GRE will allow students to go backward and forward within the test sections. Students will also be allowed a calculator on the quantitative portion of the exam.

The verbal and quantitative portions of the exam will now be scored on a scale from 130 to 170 in one point increments. The analytical writing section will still be scored from zero to six.

Some of the section lengths will change. The new GRE will include two 30-minute analytical writing tasks, two 30-minute verbal reasoning sections and two 35-minute quantitative reasoning sections.

QUESTION TYPES
Among other things, the GRE will no longer include antonym or analogy questions in the verbal reasoning section. However, it will include more reading comprehension questions, new text completion questions and sentence equivalence questions that require interpreting the context of a whole sentence.

The quantitative reasoning section will have some questions with multiple correct answers, all of which must be identified, as well as numeric entry questions.

TAKING THE TEST IN THE FALL
The new version of the GRE will be administered beginning Aug. 1. Students can register for the new test now.

Because scores for August and September administrations of the GRE will not be available until November, Wimbush said students planning on attending graduate programs beginning in the fall should not take the new test in August, and those looking at spring programs should contact their schools.

Students who take the test in August and September will receive a 50 percent discount as well.

GPSO Announces Spring 2011 Travel Award Winners

2011-03-24T00:05:00.003-04:00

IU GRADUATE AND PROFESSIONAL STUDENT ORGANIZATION (GPSO)

Released March 23, 2011

Each semester the GPSO offers a competitive, financial award for graduate and professional students to help support academic travel. The award covers expenses for events that promote academic and professional development, such as conferences, workshops, competitions and auditions. Funds may be used for registration fees, presentation materials, transportation costs, lodging and per diem expenses. The recipients are selected through a competitive, merit-based process in which an independent panel of fellow graduate and professional students review and assess anonymous applications. The GPSO would like to congratulate the following award recipients:

Spring 2011 GPSO Travel Award Winners:

Shingo Hamada, Anthropology
Viridiana Benitez, Psychology
Alexander Tatarinov, Music Strings
Philip Haralam, Fine Arts
Daniel Yurovsky, Psychology
Jennifer Jones, Communications and Culture
Jillian Rickly-Boyd, Geography
Nicholas Hersh, Music Conducting
Sarah Dees, Religious Studies
Gwen Arnold, SPEA
Olga Rass, Psychology
Joseph Harsh, Education Curriculum and Instruction
Chelsea Hamm, Music Theory
Nzingha Kendall, African American and Africa Studies

The GPSO Travel Awards are made possible by generous support from the University Graduate School. More information about travel awards can be found at http://www.iu.edu/~gpso/travel-award.php. The Graduate and Professional Student Organization is the formally recognized government for graduate and professional students at Indiana University Bloomington.

Contact Information:
Angela Jones, GPSO Communications Coordinator
gpso@indiana.edu
812-855-8747
803 8th St , Bloomington, IN 47408
www.iu.edu/~gpso

IU named a Bicycle Friendly University

2011-03-21T10:13:00.000-04:00

IU's campus

March 21, 2011

http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/17767.html?emailID=17767

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Indiana University Bloomington has been named one of the first Bicycle Friendly Universities by the League of American Bicyclists.

The league announced the designations recently at the National Bike Summit in Washington D.C. IU earned a "bronze" award for its bicycle friendliness, valid from 2011 to 2015.

The League of American Bicyclists recognized 20 universities that "create exceptional environments where bicycling can thrive," according to an announcement from the group. Universities were cited for their efforts on everything from exceptional bike parking facilities to incentive programs for students and staff.

"University life shapes students' habits for the future," said Bill Nesper, director of the league's Bicycle Friendly America program. "They have long served as incubators for developing bike-friendly cultures and practices, and that has a big impact on the expectations that students bring to the workplace and beyond."

IU received the award on the basis of an application submitted by the Office of Sustainability, which included responses to 93 in-depth questions evaluating five categories of bicycle friendliness: engineering, education, encouragement, enforcement, and evaluation and planning.

Questions ranged from quantitative details, such as how many bicycle parking spaces are provided compared to the university population, to more expansive themes. In response to a question about signature bicycling events, IU provided information about the annual Little 500 bicycle race.

As a result of filling out the application, the IU Office of Sustainability has gained more recognition of cycling-related campus shortcomings. It is working on quantifying the bike-ability of roads on and near campus and on prioritizing needs based on the areas most in need of attention. These studies will be included in the University's Comprehensive Bike Plan, due next spring.

"This national recognition adds momentum to the recommendations in the Campus Master Plan to enhance bicycle transportation pathways and amenities on campus," Director of Sustainability Bill Brown said. "We look forward to working with campus and community to continuously improve IU Bloomington bicycling to make it a more safe, convenient and fun experience for everyone.

"We are forming a Bicycle Friendly University steering committee," Brown added, "and I urge interested parties to contact our office to get involved."

Since its inception in 1880, The American League of Bicyclists strives for better cycling throughout America. It hosts a variety of programs including National Bike Month, National Bike Summit, Share the Road Campaign and Safe Routes to School Program, all aimed to strengthen cycling in the U.S. For more information, see http://www.bikeleague.org.

For more information about IU participation in the Bicycle Friendly University program, contact Office of Sustainability transportation intern Amy O'Shea at akoshea@indiana.edu.

'U.S. News' gives high marks to IU programs in nursing, law, business, education, medicine

2011-03-15T10:15:00.001-04:00

March 15, 2011

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Indiana University graduate programs in business, education, law, medicine and nursing were again ranked among the top programs in the nation in the 2012 edition of U.S. News and World Report magazine's Best Graduate Schools rankings, released today (March 15).

The rankings are available today at http://www.usnews.com. Detailed information will be available in the 2012 Best Graduate Schools publications, which will be available this week at Amazon.com and the U.S. News store.

Read more about these highly ranked programs:
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/17756.html

Chronicle: Keep the Laptop, Give Back the Dissertation

2011-03-14T10:56:00.001-04:00

March 13, 2011
By Don Troop

Jessica Osuna does not consider herself an emotional person, but when she came home one afternoon last December and found that someone had smashed in the door of her Albuquerque home and taken the laptop that contained her dissertation—six years of work—she wept.

"I just broke down," she says. "That was like to lose a child."

A doctoral candidate in ecological sciences at the University of California at Berkeley, Ms. Osuna was not naïve about safeguarding her work. She ran automatic backups of her 15-inch MacBook Pro onto a small external hard drive. Then every other day or so, she copied her work onto a one-terabyte hard drive that she kept locked in a safe, in case of fire. But whoever burglarized her home busted open the safe and took that drive, too.

Read the entire article:
http://chronicle.com/article/When-a-Thief-Takes-Your/126679/

International students highly satisfied with experience at IU

2011-03-10T10:58:00.000-05:00

International students who choose Indiana University (IU) for their education rank their experience highly, according to the recently released International Student Barometer (ISB) report, which measures international student satisfaction at more than 700 educational institutions worldwide.

Despite growing numbers of international students attending programs outside of the U.S., the U.S. remains the destination of choice for international students polled for the report. International students who chose IU did so for the quality of the teaching, quality of research, and the reputation of the department. Safety, IU’s institutional reputation, and cost also factored in.

The Leo R Dowling International Center's educational and cultural programs, and services provided by the Office of International Services were chosen as the most important aspects effecting their quality of life at IU. In terms of support while in attendance, international students were most highly satisfied in their interaction with the University Graduate School, Recreational Sports and the IMU.

The ISB Report is created by the International Graduate Insight Group (i-graduate), an independent benchmarking and research service. The report is the largest annual study of international students in the world, with feedback from over 150,000 respondents in 22 countries (and across five continents) each year.

Read the report:
https://www.indiana.edu/~intlserv/isb_presentation_2010.pdf

Two McNair scholars selected as 2011 Elvis J. Stahr award recipients

2011-03-09T14:40:00.006-05:00

Isak Nti Asare

The University Graduate School would like to congratulate two of our McNair Scholars, Isak Nti Asare and Esther Uduehi who were selected as the 2011 Elvis J. Stahr award recipients.

Isak Nti Asare is a linguistics, political science, and African studies major, with an African languages minor. In addition to being a McNair Scholar, he is also a Wells Scholar and a Hudson/Holland Scholar. Isak is awaiting graduate school acceptances, but so far was accepted to Indiana University Bloomington (Ph.D. program in political science) with a McNair Fellowship and is on the short list for Harvard.

Esther Uduehi

Esther Uduehi is a biochemistry, mathematics major, with a Spanish minor. In addition to being a McNair Scholar, she also participated in the STARS program. Esther is a Rhodes fellow and will be studying Chemistry at Oxford (England) in the fall.

The Elvis J. Stahr Distinguished Senior Award was established in 1966 by Stahr, IU's 12th president. The annual award honors three to five seniors who have excelled academically while serving as active student leaders. The names of the recipients are added to a permanent plaque that hangs in the Indiana Memorial Union.

Learn more about the Ronald E McNair Scholars Program:
http://mcnair.indiana.edu

North Carolina A&T joins IU and 11 other historically black colleges and universities in STEM effort

2011-03-09T14:35:00.000-05:00

Lagina Williams, of Xavier University of Louisiana, performs an experiment in 2008. North Carolina A&T State University has joined Xavier and 10 other historically black colleges and universities in the initiative.

March 7, 2011

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- North Carolina A&T State University has joined with Indiana University and 11 historically black colleges and universities in a partnership aimed at increasing the number of African Americans pursuing careers as researchers and scholars in science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines.
Lab photo

Lagina Williams, of Xavier University of Louisiana, performs an experiment in 2008. North Carolina A&T State University has joined Xavier and 10 other historically black colleges and universities in the initiative.

Since 2007 the partnership has provided high-achieving African American students from HBCU institutions with opportunities and mentoring to help them find and succeed in graduate-level research programs in the STEM disciplines.

IU President Michael A. McRobbie recently signed a memorandum of agreement with North Carolina A&T State University President Harold Martin that will open participation to selected individuals from that institution's 10,500-student body.

"We welcome our colleagues at North Carolina A&T State University into this important undertaking," McRobbie said. "By expanding our partnerships with our historically black colleges and universities, Indiana University is making good on its long-standing commitment to encouraging and helping students from under-represented minorities to pursue a graduate education in the STEM disciplines."

"We are very excited about this new strategic collaboration that will provide students from North Carolina A&T State University as well as other historically black colleges and universities a competitive edge in this global society as they pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)," said Harold L. Martin Sr., chancellor of North Carolina A&T.

Each summer, undergraduate students from HBCU institutions have participated in a Summer Scholars Institute and conducted research in the laboratories of faculty mentors at IU Bloomington and Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). They then present their research at the annual Summer Research Opportunities Program of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC).

North Carolina A&T University joins other partner institutions Alabama A&M, Clark Atlanta, Hampton, Jackson State, Langston, Morgan State, North Carolina Central and Tennessee State universities, as well as Bennett College for Women, Morehouse College and Xavier University of Louisiana.

Edwin Marshall, IU vice president for diversity, equity and multicultural affairs, said the Greensboro, N.C.-based, university is a good fit because of its own STEM activities. For example, several of its students already have participated informally with IU-HBCU STEM summer programs and have been on campus for other similar activities.

Marshall said the initiative's ultimate goal is to increase the number of black faculty and academic researchers traditionally underrepresented in the STEM disciplines, who also serve as mentors and role models for others.
Michael McRobbie

"According to a recent survey by the Bayer Corp., a lot of students have been deterred from pursuing careers within the STEM disciplines by their faculty and others within their academic pipeline, not because the student showed a poor acumen or was performing poorly in class, but because of non-validated information suggesting that they do something else," Marshall said. "I don't think this is done intentionally to keep students out, but a lot of faculty might think they are doing the student a favor by guiding them to areas that are a little softer."

"As we have seen with the students coming here, there is often a tendency to underestimate what they can do and contribute," he said, adding that involvement of IU faculty partners with the STEM Initiative has caused them to "become some of our biggest supporters."

"If we can increase the number of faculty in the STEM disciplines who come from similar backgrounds, and who can reflect on their own paths to achievement, it will help lead to more students following in their footsteps."

Of the 61 scholars who have participated in the IU-HBCU STEM Initiative, 25 of the 40 who have graduated so far have enrolled in master's and Ph.D. programs around the country, including at IU. In 2008 one of the students who participated during the first year enrolled at IU as a doctoral student in neuroscience and received support from the Herbert Presidential Fellows Program.

In April, IU President McRobbie and North Carolina A&T President Martin will host the CEOs of the IU-HBCU partner institutions on the campus of North Carolina A&T State University to discuss the future direction for the consortium, which could include even more student scholars, new research collaborations involving students and perhaps faculty exchanges. About 70 faculty members and administrators were involved in the original planning process

Marshall said the IU-HBCU STEM Initiative also has helped IU to identify other activities at IU Bloomington and IUPUI and tie in those programs to the STEM Initiative.

"We're developing a nexus of activity with the STEM Summer Scholars program just being one component," he said. "Many of the current ideas and concepts around collaboration might not have existed but for what we've seen happen the last four years.

"Understanding comes with conversation, so when you have students and faculty from different backgrounds and perspectives working side-by-side in a laboratory setting over the course of eight weeks, there's greater understanding and appreciation of each other," Marshall said. "The more that we can do to bring various cultures together, the better we are able to advance understanding, not just around STEM, but many other social issues as well."

More information about the IU-HBCU STEM Initiative is available at http://www.stem.indiana.edu/.

NRC Plans to Release Revised Doctoral-Program Rankings Soon

2011-03-07T16:48:00.000-05:00

By David Glenn
March 6, 2011

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The National Research Council will "shortly" release a revised version of its enormous database on American doctoral education, the project's leaders said here Friday during a conference on the past and future of doctoral-program assessment. In at least a few cases, the officials said, the revisions will significantly change certain programs' rankings.

After the NRC's long-delayed report was released last September, scholars in some fields—notably computer science —said they saw serious errors in the data.

In response to such concerns, the NRC invited programs to formally submit any problems or mistakes they had detected. Of the nearly 5,000 programs in the study, 453 submitted such letters before the November deadline, said the project's staff director, Charlotte V. Kuh, during Friday's meeting.

Read the entire article..
http://chronicle.com/article/NRC-Plans-to-Release-Revised/126631/

IU School of Education graduate student awarded prestigious Wells Fellowship

2011-03-07T12:40:00.001-05:00

For more information, see the original release:
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/17643.html?emailID=17643

Julie Frye

March 7, 2011

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- The Indiana University Graduate School has awarded Julie Frye, PhD student in Curriculum and Instruction at the IU School of Education, with the 2011-12 Wells Graduate Fellowship.

The fellowship is an award provided for by the estate of longtime IU president and University Chancellor Herman B Wells. The $33,000 award goes to a doctoral or M.F.A student who demonstrates the qualities of Chancellor Wells: leadership abilities, academic excellence, character, social consciousness, and generosity of spirit.

Frye has exhibited those qualities through her work as a school librarian, a university instructor, and a graduate student. In 2003, shortly after the latest in a series of religious wars that killed more than 1,200 in Kaduna, Nigeria, Frye traveled alone to the city to help rebuild the destroyed library. In her first semester as a public school librarian, she opposed and stopped the removal of a book from the shelves that one teacher and a principal deemed "offensive." During her master's work (MS'02 from the IU School of Library and Information Science in Indianapolis), she created a curriculum designed to engage disinterested readers that incorporated snorkeling and rock-climbing and resulted in the assigned books flying off the shelves.

"Julie Frye is a one-woman stimulus package when it comes to her leadership style," wrote Mary Nine, social studies teacher and department leader at Edgewood Intermediate School in Indianapolis, in her recommendation letter. "She lifted up her teaching colleagues and challenged them to learn new skills, try new initiatives and transform student learning."

The chair of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction wrote in his recommendation that Frye's journey to a war-torn part of Nigeria embodied Wells' call for students to devote themselves to institutions worthy of their best. "Julie, in her usual tenacious and passionate way, chose to be the first international volunteer to help reestablish a library in Kaduna," wrote Jesse Goodman. "Only someone with Julie's strong character and devotion to social justice would have the courage and resolve to be involved in such a project."

Frye has served as a visiting lecturer at IUPUI for the School of Library and Information Science, the School of Liberal Arts, and University College since 2000, and has impressed faculty and students alike. "Julie has been a true beacon of brilliant light in our first-year seminar program," wrote David Sabol, academic coordinator for Learning Communities for University College. Sabol added that Frye's work produced some of the most amazing results he had ever seen from entering students. "Julie's positive energy and competence is readily sensed by students," he said.

The award will go toward helping Frye complete her dissertation. She intends to focus on the professional socialization of new school librarians. "I'm generally interested in what's happening in schools," Frye said. "As an instructor in the School of Library and Information Science, I'm always thinking about how we can prepare our students for the school environment. So that genuine curiosity and the desire to help those first few years to not be so rocky in the transition process -- that's what has led me to the topic."

Frye becomes the third recipient of the Wells Fellowship with ties to the School of Education in the last three years. Oren Pizmony-Levy, a PhD double major in education policy studies and sociology was awarded the Wells Fellowship for 2010-11; Payal Shaw, comparative education PhD candidate, earned the award in 2009-10. Frye earned her undergraduate degree in secondary English from the IU School of Education in 2000.

"It is because of students like these that the School of Education enjoys such a wonderful national and international reputation," said Gerardo Gonzalez, dean of the School. "No wonder we are ranked among the best graduate schools of education in the world."

Frye said the award has made her think back on a chance conversation she had with Chancellor Wells' retired secretary who raved about Wells' attributes. "And I thought, I need to know more about this man," Frye said. "I really connected to his story because of his advocacy for libraries and for intellectual freedom. I feel like it's just such a great honor to be named the recipient of this fellowship."

Graduate Student of the Month: Ratan Suri

2011-03-03T10:41:00.007-05:00

Ratan Suri
Telecommunications
March 2011

Doctoral Candidate Ratnadeep Venkata Suri (Ratan) is from Hyderabad, India, and like many of his hometown counterparts, he began his academic career in the sciences. He is lucky, he said, because despite a culture focused on professional sciences and technology, he was able to pursue his interests and become a graduate student at Indiana University in the department of telecommunications.

Hyderabad serves as a major hub for the information technology industry in India, supports a variety of biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, and is host to India’s second-largest film industry. It also has the distinction of hosting Former U.S. President Bill Clinton and entrepreneur Bill Gates.

Suri was always a good writer and although he had an interest in television production, he said where he is from in India, good students are expected to go into engineering and medical science programs.

“I think coming from an intellectual environment did help a lot because my parents were very keen to push us to do what we wanted rather than what everyone else around me was doing. So I went to a school in India that had a television production focus and that was a launching point for me to realize that I was better at that than what I had been doing in my undergrad, which was molecular biology—a complete switch.”

At first Suri chose another school for his degree, but soon realized that the breadth of research in the telecommunications department at IU would better support his research vision to examine how communications technologies influence society.

“But my dissertation is quite different from what other researchers in a telecommunications department might do,” he said. “It’s an ethnographic study of what happens when a community of geographers and historians use a particular or unique technology for historical research. For example, how does that community grapple with a new technology and how does it affect historical scholarship?”

For his dissertation, Suri is looking at three major case studies of how GIS influences historical research. The first study looks at the development of railroads in San Francisco and the surrounding areas and how that influenced agricultural practices and movement of people and goods. The second study examines how the dust bowl has been studied historically and how that history changes when seen through the lens of geographical information systems (GIS). The third is a case study on the holocaust.

“It’s a group of researchers from England, New Zealand, and the United States interested in WWII and European history, who got together to study different aspects of holocaust from a geographical perspective. They used GIS for their research. My dissertation is looking at how they study history…How is this scholarship changing historical research?” Suri said.

Essentially, Suri is combining mass media and information science with a new media perspective in order to take an interdisciplinary look at these issues.

The approach may seem very meta, but what Suri is really doing—examining how new technologies and an increasing digital fluency in traditional research fields is changing the way research is done—is a topic of current interest as scholars increasingly embrace technology as a research tool.

For example, the Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported (http://chronicle.com/article/Social-Media-Lure-Academics/126426/) that the time-honored tradition of peer review in journals has been put into question by younger social scientists, many of whom increasingly prefer to use social-media to distribute content more broadly within their field.

“Traditionally every field has its way of doing things… and traditionally historical researchers have not used high end technology. So when historians picked up that tool [GIS], not only did their method for analyzing historical events change, but what they use for historical evidence, and how they go about teaming up to analyze that data, has changed. That puts a lot of pressure on an existing set of norms that are traditionally part of historical research,” he said.

“The field of history has been a little slow to accept this change, so there is inherent tension between the established norms and the new norms that are emerging. To be able to capture that tension gives us a greater understanding of how we can look at the influence of technology on a social system.”

The case studies used in his dissertation give Suri a particular example of what has been done with a new technology, in this case, GIS. What he is discovering is that Historical GIS is emerging as a field where historians don’t do the historical research. It is other scholars who have picked up a historical perspective.

“There are very few historians who are at the forefront of this [Historical GIS],” he said. “If look at scholarship publications and at the affiliation of the scholars, you will see that most of them are not historians.”

Examples like this show that that particular field is not conducive to a particular technology, Suri said. As a researcher, he would like to further understand how technologies are distributed throughout a society, like how the historians he is studying in his dissertation have embraced or not embraced technology. He believes understanding how technology influences a community can reveal trends in society and this is important to scholars, because the use of technology can be tied with the progress of the field.

“And a field that is steeped in tradition can sometimes be resistant to that kind of change,” he said.

Among his accomplishments, Ratan Suri has taught at Howard University on a Future Faculty Teaching Fellowship, received special mention from the principle investigator of "Holocaust Geographies" at a final presentation of the work at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., and received a College of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Year Research Fellowship for the 2011-12 academic year.

Media Contacts:
Erika Lee, Director of Communications, The University Graduate School, ebigalee@indiana.edu
Angela Jones, The IU Graduate and Professional Student Organization, gpso@indiana.edu

The Graduate and Professional Student Organization and the University Graduate School would like to congratulate Ratan Suri on receiving the GPSO/UGS Recognition Award. Students selected for this award were nominated by a faculty member from within their department, and selected by the GPSO and UGS for excellence in their graduate studies at Indiana University.

IU students well represented among international fellowship and scholarship recipients

2011-03-02T10:37:00.000-05:00

http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/16926.html

Jan. 13, 2011

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Students from Indiana University Bloomington received more than 35 nationally competitive awards that sent them to study in countries around the world last summer and during the 2010-2011 academic year.

The awards are sponsored by a number of agencies including the Departments of State and Education, the National Security Education Program (NSEP), the Marshall and Rhodes programs of the United Kingdom, the American Scandinavian Foundation and the German-American Exchange Service. The majority of the grantees are pursuing research projects in a range of disciplines around the world while other awards fund participation in guided programs such as language training, academic study abroad or working as an English teaching assistant.
Brendan Faegre

Brendan Faegre (left) from the IU Jacobs School of Music works with Norwegian composer Lasse Thoresen at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo.

Among the research award grantees are nine recipients of Fulbright Hays and Fulbright U.S. Student grants that are sponsored, respectively, by the Department of Education and the Department of State. Fulbright Hays grantees conduct dissertation research in countries outside of Western Europe. The destinations for this year's recipients are Mali, Russia, South Africa, Ghana and Israel. Two Fulbright U.S. Student recipients are currently conducting research in Morocco and Germany, and another will start teaching English in Argentina this month.

Research awards granted to IU students also include NSEP-sponsored Boren Fellowships to Brazil and Syria, an American Scandinavian Foundation fellowship to Norway, German-American Exchange Service awards to Germany, an American Councils award to Russia, an IREX research grant to former Yugoslavian countries and a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship to South Africa.

Other activities of student award recipients support intensive language training or directed study programs. Eight IU students received State Department-sponsored Critical Language Scholarships during the summer of 2010. These graduate and undergraduate students traveled to countries in the Middle East, Central Asia, Russia and India to participate in intensive study in languages critical to the United States including Turkish, Persian, Arabic, Hindi and Russian.

Other recipients of directed grants include 13 undergraduates who received Gilman and Boren Scholarships which support a semester or a full academic year of study abroad in countries outside of Western Europe.

Indiana University students are consistently represented in top competitions for scholarships to universities in the United Kingdom. William Yu was named one of 40 Marshall Scholars and is currently in his second year of study in the United Kingdom pursuing degrees at the Imperial College of London. Two IU students have also recently been named Rhodes Scholars. Mutsa Mutembwa was named a 2010 scholar and is currently at the University of Oxford, and Esther Uduehi was named a scholar for 2011.

"We honor the hard work and determination exhibited by these students and congratulate them on their accomplishments," said Patrick O'Meara, IU vice president of international affairs. "These students bring back detailed research results that advance their respective disciplines. Their extensive periods spent abroad and increased language abilities contribute to our collective efforts to better understand and interact with other cultures."

Below is a list of IU students awarded international grants from summer 2010 through the current academic year. The list is ordered alphabetically by name of award and includes name, primary course of study and destination country.

American Councils Title VIII Combined Research and Language Training Award
Joanna Matuszak -- Art History, Russia

American Scandinavian Foundation
Brendan Faegre -- Music Composition, Norway

Boren Fellowships
Gregory Auclair -- Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Syria
Timothy Thompson -- Library and Information Science, Brazil

Boren Scholarships
Bethany Muncy -- East Asian Languages and Cultures, Japan
Luke Martineac -- Business, China

Critical Language Scholarships (for intensive language study during summer 2010)
Lennea Carty -- Central Eurasian Studies, Turkey (Turkish)
John Dechant -- Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Tajikistan (Persian)
Jessica Evans -- Folklore and Ethnomusicology, India (Hindi)
Jamie Johnson -- Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Egypt (Arabic)
Nicholas Kontovas -- Central Eurasian Studies, Turkey (Turkish)
Niels Lee -- History, Turkey (Turkish)
Christopher Roush -- Russian and East European Studies, Russia (Russian)
Anne Vithayathil -- History, Tajikistan (Persian)

Fulbright U.S. Student Awards
Jacqueline Cornetta -- English Teaching Assistant, Argentina
Ahmed Khanani -- Political Science, Morocco
Joel Klein -- Cultural and Intellectual History, Germany

Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Awards
Jessica Hurd -- Art History, Mali
Joanna Matuszak -- Art History, Russia
Megan Musgrave -- History, Russia
Fileve Palmer -- Anthropology, South Africa
Fred Pratt -- History, Ghana
Karen Ross -- Education, Israel

German American Exchange Service Awards (DAAD)
Joo Hyung Kim -- Political Science, Germany
Sibyl Kleiner -- Sociology, Germany

Gilman Scholarships
Kayla Douglas -- African American and African Diaspora Studies, Ghana
Olivia Holloway -- Arts and Sciences, Brazil
Jamie Johnson -- Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Jordan
Justin Martinson -- Communication and Culture, Germany
Bethany Muncy -- East Asian Languages and Cultures, Japan
David Osborn -- Business, Ghana
Genevieve Postlethwait -- Journalism, China
Olivia Schmidt -- Biology, Italy
Richard Scinteie -- Communication and Culture, Spain
Emily Spiegel -- Sport Marketing and Management, South Africa
Chelsea Todd -- International Studies, Brazil

IREX Individual Advanced Research Grant
Ramajana Hidic-Demirovic -- History, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia

Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship
Fileve Palmer -- Anthropology, South Africa

"Who Am I-U?" Conference on Identity: Thurs-Fri March 4-5, 2011

2011-02-28T11:44:00.000-05:00

Conference Website:
https://www.indiana.edu/~arc2010/2011/

The idea behind this conference is that individuals who feel their identities validated in public venues are better able to accept others’ identities, and to analyze critically the social forces and experiences that have shaped their own. We would like to transform our campus into spaces for just this kind of critical exploration and sharing among students, staff, faculty, administrators, alumni, and emeriti of all backgrounds, majority and minority.

Financial aid application deadline is March 10

2011-02-25T14:58:00.000-05:00

Feb. 25, 2011
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/17536.html?emailID=17536

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Officials in the Indiana University Office of Admissions are reminding students interested in applying for financial aid for the 2011-2012 academic year of the upcoming filing deadline.

All aid applicants must complete the 2011-2012 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) by March 10 (Thursday) to be considered for Indiana state scholarships and grants. In addition, certain campus-based financial aid awards have limited funding and are awarded only to eligible students who complete the FAFSA by that date. Students and parents can complete the FAFSA online at http://www.fafsa.ed.gov.

To complete the FAFSA, applicants will need financial information for both the student and parents including 2010 federal income tax returns, W-2 forms, and any other 2010 taxable and/or untaxed income statements. If you or your parents will not have your federal tax returns completed by March 10, you can use estimated income amounts. Once your federal taxes are filed, you may correct your FAFSA by using the IRS data retrieval process within the online FAFSA website.

If you will need to make corrections to the FAFSA after you have submitted it to the processor, the corrections must be completed before May 16 to still be considered for state scholarships and grants. Information about Indiana state scholarship and grant programs is available at http://www.in.gov/ssaci/index.htm.

The FAFSA can be signed electronically using a PIN number from the U.S Department of Education. Both students and parents can apply for a PIN at http://www.pin.ed.gov.

Students must complete a new FAFSA each year and meet the application deadlines for each new application year. More information about the aid application process at Indiana University is available at http://www.indiana.edu/~sfa/index.html.

Performance measures restrict funding to IU graduate programs

2011-02-25T11:34:00.000-05:00

By Katie Dawson | IDS Reports | Feb. 24, 2011
http://www.idsnews.com/news/story.aspx?id=80114

Indiana’s Commission for Higher Education has called for 5 percent of all current university funding to be redistributed using a new formula based on performance measures.

The new formula was created to provide an incentive for universities to meet specific performance requirements, such as an increase in on-time graduation rates, successfully completed credit hours and other standards, said Karen Hanson, IU executive vice president and provost.

If schools don’t meet the requirements, they lose funding.

“If we do well on those measures, then we’ll get more than our money back. If we do less well on those measures, we get less of our money back,” said Neil Theobald, vice president for financial affairs.

Theobald said IU might have a hard time meeting some of the requirements.

“At the current time, we lose fairly substantially,” Theobald said.
Theobald said the reason IU is having trouble is because the state’s performance-based measures were developed for undergraduate education only.

IU’s medical school and graduate schools lose money because they can’t compete for their funding against undergraduate education, Theobald said.

Hanson said IU is doing great as a college but can’t possibly live up to the measures set by the state.

“We’re not opposed to performance-based measures, but we think they need to make sense given the mission and character of the campus,” Hanson said during a meeting with the Bloomington Faculty Council on Feb. 15.

Theobald said the University has already talked to the commission about its concerns on the measures.

“Right now, you’ve got Ivy Tech and the IU medical school as the same,” Theobald said. “Your performance is based on what your mission is. The mission of a community college and the mission of a medical school are wildly different.”

Changing the standards and adding more performance measures for graduate schools would make it easier for IU’s graduate schools to receive more money.

“We’re in favor of it. I think it’s a good idea,” Theobald said. “It’s just a work in progress, and the commission knows that.”

IU revises Ph.D. research guidelines

2011-02-22T13:20:00.000-05:00

By Caitlin Ryan | IDS
Feb. 22, 2011

http://www.idsnews.com/news/story.aspx?id=80021

Ph.D. students can no longer serve as principal investigators of their own work.

In January, the Office of Research Administration at Indiana University released a change in policy regarding principal investigators on studies involving human subjects. According to this new policy, the PI of a student’s work must be one of the individuals listed on the Human Subject Office’s website as an academic appointee eligible for this title.

Among those eligible are faculty members such as professors or assistant professors, librarians, deans, chancellors and research staff. Students, lecturers, teachers and research associates are no longer allowed to hold the title of principal investigator on research approved by the University.

Dr. Peter Finn, chairman of the Institutional Review Board, helped to make the final decision regarding the policy.

The rationale behind this change is that students are only “temporarily affiliated with the University,” thus it is more suitable for a tenured faculty member to oversee information.

“Faculty members are much more accountable to the University than students. Technically, in the past, the faculty member advising the project should have been responsible, but they weren’t always ... this change in policy puts more of the responsibility on them,” Finn said.

This policy does not change the way graduate students conduct research, but leads to questions regarding responsibility versus ownership of research.

Marda Rose, a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic linguistics, said she is concerned.
“By writing the professor’s name as the principal investigator on the project, the student no longer has a written document that clearly states that the research he or she is conducting is his or her own,” she said. “What is at stake is who is getting credit for the research.”

Other graduate students have expressed their concern regarding awareness of the new policy.

Traci Nagle, another Ph.D. candidate at IU, said “I found out about (the policy change) only when a friend called it to my attention ... I was not notified of this policy decision by the Human Subject’s office. Had my friend not told me about it, I probably would not have found out about it until I had to submit a Continuing Review in October.”

Existing studies will not be modified to reflect the new policy until the next “amendment.” Finn said an e-mail announcement was sent out regarding the new policy.

“The key issue here is that the person who is the principal investigator on the IRB (form) is not the same as the person who is the principal investigator doing the research,” Finn said. “The students remain the principal investigator on their own study, but under their faculty member.”

Finn said there are a variety of avenues for students to pursue through the University and the Human Subjects Office if they are concerned about who would be accredited with being the primary author on their study.

“Being the principal investigator on the IRB (form) does not confer authorship or ownership of the data,” Finn said.

Graduating in May? Attend Grad Fair.

2011-02-18T15:44:00.001-05:00

Take care of all your Commencement needs in one place at one time at GradFair 2011:

* Rent your cap and gown
* Purchase graduate announcements and diploma frames
* Have formal pictures taken in academic regalia
* Visit information tables hosted by University Ceremonies and Commencement and the Indiana University Alumni Association.

When: February 23, 24 and 25, 2011

What Time: 10 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Where: State Rooms East and West, Indiana Memorial Union

For complete information on Grad Fair and ordering caps and gowns, visit: http://www.commencement.iu.edu/bloomington/graduate2011.shtml

For complete information on Commencement 2011, visit http://www.commencement.iu.edu/.

Check out the new Graduate Commencement Handbook at
http://www.commencement.iu.edu/doc/graduate-commencement-handbook.pdf.

2010 University Graduate School Annual Report

2011-02-15T13:16:00.004-05:00

The University Graduate School promotes and supports excellence in graduate education for individual students, faculty, departments, and the university as a whole.

The 2010 University Graduate School Annual Report

Learn more about graduate education initiatives at IU, as well as nationally and internationally.

Grad Student volunteers needed for usability testing on new commencement website

2011-02-15T10:24:00.001-05:00

** Please contact Heather directly to sign up for a time to participate, spaces are limited **

The test will take between 45 minutes to an hour, and will take place at the Von Lee. No preparation is necessary - you will be asked a series of task based questions related to the website being tested. The testing will occur Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of this week (2/21-25), between 8 a.m. and 12 p.m. (with the last test starting at 12). More times at later dates may be available as well.

Participants will receive a $10 Starbucks gift card for their time and participation.

--
Heather Beery, Information Architect
Creative Services, Indiana University

812.855.0089
hbeery@indiana.edu
http://creativeservices.iu.edu/

IU Doctoral Students Uncover Glitch in Facebook’s Security

2011-02-08T11:58:00.002-05:00

A team of Indiana University doctoral students is responsible for finding a glitch in Facebook's security protocol.

http://indianapublicmedia.org/news/iu-doctoral-students-uncover-glitch-facebooks-security/

By Claire Wiseman
February 7, 2011

A team of Indiana University doctoral students is responsible for finding a glitch in Facebook’s security protocol. Rui Wang and Zhou Li, who research systems security at the School of Informatics, discovered that a vulnerability in Facebook’s platform code allowed private information like phone numbers to become accessible to bogus third party websites.

Wong said the team simulated a hacker’s behavior in order to discover the site’s vulnerability. For Lee, their research was an opportunity to make a lasting impact.

“I’m not sure, but I think most Americans live on Facebook, so if one day they found when they get up their information lost to some other guys and their words posted with some garbage information, then I think there might be some very serious problems,” said Lee.

Wang and Lee created a video demonstrating the problem and posted it online. Facebook officials saw it and responded with a fix.

Now accepting applications for the Santosh Jain scholarship

2011-02-08T10:59:00.007-05:00

The University Graduate School is pleased to announce we are offering a new award, the Santosh Jain Endowed Memorial Scholarship. This award is for the Bloomington campus only.

The Santosh Jain scholarship honors the memory of the spouse of Chaman Jain, a senior lecturer in SPEA. Santosh Jain was well known among international graduate students. She was born in Lahore, India, which is now part of Pakistan. She first came to the United States from New Delhi, India, in 1970 with her husband and their two small children in order for Chaman Jain to attend graduate school at IU. Throughout the years, she supported her family as they pursued higher education, and was passionate about serving her community and promoting education. She was a founding member of the India Society of Bloomington, a group dedicated to assisting impoverished women and children in India. She was also well known in the graduate student community for her culinary skills.

The scholarship offers financial support to a current international graduate student who has demonstrated commitment to service and education and plans to pursue a service-oriented career and demonstrates financial need. The recipient will possess a track record of service to underserved or rural communities, humanitarian causes, or educational organizations in activities that support an improvement in the lives and opportunities to those in impoverished communities. Preference will be given to graduate students from South Asia, in particular those hailing from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Sikkim.

The application deadline for students is Friday, March 4, 2011, and March 18, 2011, for departments.

Application materials and details:
http://www.indiana.edu/~grdschl/pdf/Santosh_Jain.pdf

The press release on this award:
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/14023.html

Contact Yvonne Dwigans if you have any questions.

Yvonne Dwigans
Administrative Assistant & Fellowships Coordinator
Indiana University Graduate School
Kirkwood Hall, Room 114
130 S. Woodlawn Ave.
Bloomington, IN 47405
812-855-8852 (office)
812-855-4266 (fax)
http://www.graduate.indiana.edu

IDS: FNECC first Craft Night creates cultural experience for students

2011-02-05T10:56:00.000-05:00

Dr. Sonya Atalay Ojiwe, Instructor at the First Nations Educational and Cultural Center, talks with Marilyn Cleveland, an elder beading master from Cherokee and white mountain Apache during Craft Night on Thursday at Weatherly Hall.

By Eshley Spitzer | IDS
Jan. 20, 2011

http://www.idsnews.com/news/story.aspx?id=79322

New and old members of the First Nations Educational and Cultural Center came together to celebrate culture for the first time this semester for Craft Night on Thursday.

Twenty FNECC members excitedly greeted one another, enjoyed a free dinner and listened to Native American music before starting the craft activity.

Dr. Brian Gilley, FNECC director and associate professor of anthropology, said he was very pleased to see the returning faces.

“Our goal is to put culture first and build a community from culture. That’s why we have Craft Night,” Gilley said.

Gilley said he has worked hard to make the cultural center in Weatherly Hall a welcoming environment where Native American students can feel at home and experience culture.

“We want a place where students can come catch a TV show between classes, eat lunch, feel at home and have a sense of community,” Gilley said.

The FNECC tries to reach out to any student looking to connect to his culture or learn more about Native American traditions.

“If you are from a reservation or community, you are going to come to Craft Night and recognize the smells, sounds, the interactions, the practices — but anyone who wants to come and learn respectively is welcome,” Gilley said. “The key element is, of course, respect.”

Students, IU community members and Bloomington community members that attended the Craft Night learned how to make customary shawls that would be used at a Pow Wow or celebration.

The program was led by Dr. Sonya Atalay, an assistant professor of anthropology and FNECC member.

“We are going to learn how to make a shawl tonight and learn about a Native American woman’s role in her family and in her community,” Atalay said to the Craft Night attendees.

She said she hopes to teach the group how to put together a whole Regalia — a traditional wardrobe — through her workshops.

“I’ve been trying to keep things moving, recruit students and teach traditions,” Atalay said in between practicing cultural chants with children attending the event.

She continued to share how much events like this mean to her.

“I just love being around these people. This is our IU family, and we can’t always go home and be at ceremonies, so having people around and having this community for me and my kids is something I always look forward to,” Atalay said.

The FNECC regularly has activities, bringing students together through culture and the arts.

Their educational events include speakers, movie nights and many workshops such as basket weaving, beading and other crafts.

Since about four years ago, FNECC has been able to reach out to students who want to experience Native American culture.

“I was looking for a native community where I could learn about my culture as a Native American in the Ojibway tribe, and I found it at FNECC,” said Nathen Steininger, a senior at IU who regularly attends FNECC events. “It is the sense of community that keeps me coming back. I fit in here, I feel like I belong here, and I feel connected to a part of my identity.”

Graduate Student of the Month: Josh Carney

2011-02-03T10:52:00.002-05:00

Josh Carney
Communications and Culture
February 2011

Josh Carney’s path to graduate school in Communication and Culture at IU is as interesting as his research, and it begins with a trip to Africa.

After receiving a BA cum laude from Whitman College in Washington, Carney spent a year in Malawi on a Fulbright where he served as the principal investigator of the Phalombe Ethnobotanical Survey for the Mulanje Mountain Conversation trust. The goal of the survey was to preserve traditional plant knowledge and gauge the effects of deforestation.

While in Malawi, Carney began writing about what he saw and the process appealed to him --enough that his path next led to an MA in English at Western Washington University followed by an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. In Arizona, he wrote about his work in ethnobotany and travels in Malawi.

Carney has an interest in how other cultures work, and after completing his MFA, he traveled to Turkey to teach English for a few years. As he spent time learning Turkish and observing the culture, he became increasingly interested in Turkish media. In particular, Carney wanted to understand how Turks regard the U.S. in the post-9/11 era.

“I was there at a time when the U.S. was becoming increasingly unpopular in Turkey, mainly due to the war in Iraq,” Carney said. “I got to see how the U.S. appeared in Turkish popular media --books and film and that sort of thing-- and I got very interested in that and decided to go back to graduate school.”

Carney’s path eventually led to IU where he is currently a doctoral student in Communication and Culture. His dissertation prospectus is a media ethnography project to study the image of the U.S. in Turkey through the production, circulation and reception of the genre of “political action” novels, films and television. Carney hopes to spend more time in Turkey next year gathering ethnographic research on the audiences and the producers of the texts he has studied. For example, he wants to interview and observe the film makers for a Turkish television and film series.

“It’s sort of a mafia crime drama, but what’s interesting is that it takes events from the daily news and within months they are part of the film plot. People are concerned about it because it seems to be melding fact and fiction in strange ways and the audiences for that series get very into it. I hope to speak with the filmmakers, but also interview and observe the audiences watching their films --see what kind of communities they are forming and how they feel about the texts,” he said.

“There are a lot of rumors about how these texts work and there are a lot of assumptions about how the audience understands them, but not much work has gone into talking to people and asking what is their understanding of this?

“One of the texts I’m looking at combines seven major events that happened during the Iraq war, but the main plot is about a mafia infiltrator –a secret service agent- who goes into Iraq to get revenge on a commander who insulted some Turks. So the background and plotline is mostly fictional, but it has things like the Abu Ghraib prison photos in it and other events that actually happened. The third movie from that series came out in January and it incorporated the Gaza flotilla raid from May 2010 into its plot.”

In assessing these texts and their social impact, Carney works closely with his advisor, Jon Simons, who specializes in image studies and political theory, as well as with anthropologist Ilana Gershon, reception specialist Barbara Klinger, and Erdem Cipa, from Turkish Studies.

Since joining IU, Carney has been awarded two Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships to study Turkish and Kurdish, as well as the Virginia Gunderson Award for the best graduate seminar paper in the Department of Communication and Culture, an American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT) award for intensive Turkish language study at Bogazici University in Istanbul, and an Institute of Turkish Studies (ITS) summer fellowship coupled with an IU Pre-Dissertation grant that enabled Carney to begin his field-work.

While at IU Carney has also helped to found two organizations: the salsa dance group Ritmos Latinos, now in its fourth year in Bloomington and, more recently, a group called Hoosiers for Peace in the Middle East, which is devoted to fostering education and dialog regarding conflicts in the Middle east, including the Israel/Palestine conflict and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Contact Information:
For more information on the student of the month, contact Erika Lee at the University Graduate School, ebigalee@indiana.edu, or Angela Jones at the Graduate and Professional Student Organization, gpso@indiana.edu.

Grad students learn effective presentation skills at the 2011 "Not a Retreat, But a Forward"

2011-01-27T11:50:00.001-05:00

Graduate student participants at the 2011 "Not a Retreat, But a Forward"

Each January, the IU Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program offers a professional development workshop for graduate students from the Bloomington and Indianapolis campuses called “Not a Retreat, But a Forward.” The topic for the fifth annual workshop was “Effective Presentations.” Previous workshop topics covered grant writing skills and effective communication skills.

“Not A Retreat But A Forward” was co-hosted for the first time by the IUPUI UPnGO (www.iupui.edu/~upngo) and the IU AGEP program (graduate.indiana.edu/agep) on the Bloomington campus. In addition to IU AGEP students who are primarily in the natural sciences and mathematics, attendees also included graduate students from the social and behavioral sciences, education and the humanities.

One attendee commented: “I sometimes think I am not adequately able to articulate myself verbally (I'm better at written communication) so this workshop was helpful for that purpose.”

Five advanced IUB doctoral students facilitated the day-long workshop: Valerie Benton, Biochemistry; Nancy Ortiz, Chemistry; Paul Rohwer, Computer Science; Tiffani Saunders, Sociology; and Carlos Zednik, Cognitive Science. Each demonstrated how to design and deliver a different kind of informal and formal presentations such as roundtables, paper, oral and lightening talks. Tips on constructing effective slides were also shared and students were able to practice what they learned in small groups.

“AGEP offers excellent, needed topics, the events are well attended and so organized, the presenters are excellent and respond to questions and further feedback, and overall, it is a great learning experience that really enhances our IU graduate school experience,” writes another attendee.

AGEP is a National Science Foundation-funded grant program dedicated to the increasing the number and diversity of Ph.D. graduates in the sciences and engineering who go on to academic careers.

Fifty Percent Discount on GRE between August 1 and September 30

2011-01-25T11:00:00.001-05:00

Educational Testing Services (ETS) has announced that students taking the revised GRE General Exam between August 1 and September 30, 2011 will receive a 50% discount -- a big savings since the exam price is $160.00.

You can find out more about this offer, and the revised GRE, on the ETS website: www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/know

2011 Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) Conference

2011-01-25T10:58:00.002-05:00

Indiana University’s 2011 PFF Conference
Friday, Feb. 18, 8:30 am – 4:30 pm

This year is the 16th Annual PFF graduate student conference. The day-long, campus-wide conference attracts IU graduate students from a multitude of disciplines and stages of their graduate career and focuses on information that further prepares them to be successful faculty members. The IU community and its graduates have benefited from this conference for over a decade.

Preliminary Schedule:

8:30-9:00 Registration and Coffee

9:00-9:15 Welcome (Dean Wimbush)

9:15-10:45 Career Options: Responsibilities and Rewards

11:00-12:30 Navigating the Job Market

12:30-2:00 Lunch, keynote speaker: David Zaret (Alumni Hall)

2:00-3:15 Developing a Professional Record of Teaching, Research, and Service

3:30-4:30 Becoming a Member of Your Academic Discipline And Networking ***New Session****

Workshop: Tales from the Trenches: Strategies for Teaching Effectively

2011-01-25T10:54:00.001-05:00

Faculty and graduate students are invited to the following workshop.

Tales from the Trenches: Strategies for Teaching Effectively
Tuesday Jan. 25
Noon to 1:15pm
Office for Women’s Affairs Lounge, Memorial Hall East

The classroom, both real and virtual, is the primary venue professors have in which to share knowledge, encourage ethical behavior, and inspire students to be life-long learners. What a privilege! And what a responsibility! If you feel daunted by this task, or if feedback from students has you worried about your teaching effectiveness, don’t despair. Panel members will share tips and strategies “from the trenches” of their own experiences, and will field questions from the audience as well. Panel members: Sabrina Sullenberger (SWK-), Sara Skrabalak (CHEM), Maresa Murray (HPER), Kasia Chmielewska (CMCL), with Moderator, Joan Middendorf (CITL/HESA).

New inquiry methodology Ph.D. program in IU School of Education enrolling students

2011-01-21T11:10:00.000-05:00

Unique program could help fill need for more test experts

Jan. 21, 2010

BLOOMINGTON, Ind.--The Indiana University School of Education has opened enrollment for its new Inquiry Methodology Ph.D. program.

The new degree could help fill needed roles in designing and interpreting standardized tests. The program emphasizes studying and developing research techniques that can help better inform public debates about education policy. Those admitted to the program will be part of the first class of Inquiry Methodology doctoral students in the fall of 2011.

The program -- approved by the Indiana Commission for Higher Education two years ago -- will prepare graduates to teach; to consult with other social science and educational researchers; and to work in numerous types of research, development, and policy centers. Students earning the Ph.D. will be prepared to advise on educational policies and to work for companies and government agencies that develop standardized tests around the world.

Read more:
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/16997.html?emailID=16997

Graduate Student of the Month: Kaylah Lalonde

2011-01-13T10:45:00.002-05:00

Kaylah Lalonde
Speech and Hearing Sciences
January 2011

Kaylah Lalonde

Kaylah Lalonde, a second-year Ph.D. student in Speech and Hearing Sciences at Indiana University, might not exactly say she heard the call to do research on hearing. But what Lalonde will say is that she has always wanted to teach and early on in her education she explored every topic from writing to psychology.

Then, during her first year as an undergraduate student at Louisiana State University, she shadowed a speech therapist for a day. As they traveled from home-to-home to meet with children under three, Lalonde learned about the wide range of issues encountered by a speech therapist –from autism to hearing loss to cognitive impairment – and found it fascinating.

At first, she took classes on the clinical track for speech pathology, but the summer before her junior year, Lalonde was invited to join the McNair Scholars Program, paired with a mentor, and with that person’s help, developed a project of her own.

“I had a great mentor there who let me work hands-on. We started from scratch, developed the idea and ran all the way through with it. That’s how I got involved in research and decided it was more interesting and fun than the clinic,” she said. She continued on into the doctoral program in Speech and Hearing Sciences at IU, where Lalonde received the McNair Graduate Fellowship, a highly selective, campus-wide competition supporting graduate students for up to five years.

Lalonde is researching developmental speech perception. She studies the processes that allow us to understand speech, starting with the ear and working up to the brain, and how those processes develop.
“There are different levels of speech perception, such as detection, discrimination, recognition, and comprehension,” Lalonde said. Her current research focuses on the discrimination level.

“All of these levels are important, and a breakdown at any level can be problematic for language development. If a child's hearing aid or cochlear implant settings are not sufficient to allow them to discriminate between speech sounds (such as the difference between the words ‘so’ and ‘show’), they may have difficulty forming robust phonological representations,” she said.

She has worked closely with her advisor, Professor Rachael Holt on a project designed to find better ways to test speech discrimination in toddlers. Before this study began, Professor Holt worked with speech discrimination in adults and children from the age of four, and similar work has been done with infants. The research involves adapting the procedures that have been successful with older children, to compensate for the limitations of testing 2- and 3-year-olds. Holt estimates that Lalonde has tested the sound-discrimination of more than 40 children between the ages of 2- and 3-years-old.

“The age range we work with has been ignored, because toddlers are so hard to test,” she said. “You can hold an infant in your lap and watch their reaction to a stimulus, but toddlers are hard to keep in one place. Getting toddlers to understand what you’re asking of them, and then holding their interest is a challenge. Toddlers aren’t fully intelligible—we can’t always understand what they are trying to say—so you can’t simply ask a toddler what they hear and see,” she said.

First the toddlers receive a quick hearing screening, as is done with newborns, to make sure the child has normal hearing.

“Then to test speech discrimination we have them stand on a mat and listen to some speech sounds and make a judgment as to whether all the sounds are the same or whether there was a change in the sound. So maybe it will say ‘ba ba ba ba’ or maybe ‘ba ba boo boo.’ We of course put it in the context of games,” Lalonde said. “We do whatever works, really. You have to work around what the child does and adapt yourself to their manner.”

To measure whether the child can discriminate between the sounds, the child is first taught how the test will work using animal sounds, so they will understand what is being asked of them. Then, the tester moves into more abstract non-words like the sounds that will be used during the testing. Lalonde said this is so that she can test perceptual abilities, as opposed to language abilities. Each sound pair is presented 36 times.

“We then use statistics to determine whether the toddler can differentiate between sounds and how much of their choice is based on some bias, such as preferring a particular picture,” she said. “We hope to develop better methods that can eventually be used in the clinic for young children with hearing loss, to test the benefits of cochlear implants and hearing aids and determine whether the aids need to be adjusted,” she said.

With this project, Lalonde and her co-researchers found that children were variable in their performance, as is to be expected, she said, and she is now looking into factors that might be causing this by looking at behavior, language development, and working memory measures, and “we’re adapting the test a little based on what we saw with the kids,” she said, “. . . to make sure they really do understand the task and to hold their attention longer.”

For her next project, Lalonde will also use audio-visual testing to see if toddlers use visuals speech information (e.g. such as in lip reading) to compliment the auditory signal, particularly when noise disrupts the auditory signal. Other research with older children suggests that children this age don’t use signals from the face in the same manner as adults and may not use the face to compensate for the information they miss when listening in noisy situations.

“No one has been able to show whether children that young benefit from seeing the face whenever they are hearing speech,” she said. “We know that in a noisy situation, or in adults with hearing impairment, whenever the speech is degraded in some way, people look at the face of the person speaking for extra information to help piece together the signal. We know infants are sensitive to that sort of information, but the ability to use the information develops with age.

“I hope that by using discrimination, a lower level of perception than used in previous research, we can demonstrate that children use visual speech information at a younger age than previous literature suggests.”

IDS: 14 graduate students receive fall travel scholarships

2010-12-07T13:56:00.000-05:00

By Claire Aronson | IDS Reports
Dec. 6, 2010

The Graduate and Professional Student Organization recently awarded 14 travel awards to full-time graduate and professional students. Six $500 awards and eight $250 awards were given to the winners — chosen out of about 140 applicants this semester.

The winners were chosen by an independent panel of graduate students not affiliated with GPSO, Angela Jones, GPSO communications coordinator, said.

“We tend to always get a good breadth of winners,” Jones said. “GPSO knows that travel is an important part to a graduate student’s career.”

GPSO presents travel awards in both the fall and spring semesters, Jones said, and the money must be used for academic travel purposes, which include present work or participation in a conference or audition. Spring award applications will be available online in January.

“It has to be for something really integral and specific to their career, and they need to show why they need to be there,” Jones said.

GPSO has increased the amount of recipients throughout the past several years, she said.

“It is a really great service that other organizations aren’t really doing,” Jones said.
Kevin Guidry, GSPO awards officer, said there were 41 members of the panel this semester.

“They did a great job, and I think the results came out pretty well,” he said.

GPSO typically receives a lot more applicants from graduate students in the social sciences and humanities than the physical sciences because there is less funding available for the humanities, Guidry said.

“This is reflective in the winners this semester,” he said.

http://www.idsnews.com/news/story.aspx?id=78904

Relaunched M.F.A. program at IU expected to be 'bridge' to world of professional playwriting

2010-12-06T10:47:00.000-05:00

Dec. 6, 2010

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- After a three-year hiatus, Indiana University's Department of Theatre and Drama in the College of Arts and Sciences will once again offer a master's degree in playwriting.

Read the article:
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/16606.html?emailID=16606

School Spirit Pop Quiz brought to you by PhD Comics

2010-12-04T11:39:00.001-05:00

PhD Comics is written by Jorge Cham, http://www.phdcomics.com

How many points did you get?

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1402

Graduate Student of the Month: Francisco Parada

2010-12-03T14:46:00.008-05:00

Francisco Parada
Neuroscience and Psychology
December 2010

If you were to visit Francisco Parada in the Imaging Research Facility lab, you wouldn’t see his desk at first. Instead, you’d see scattered papers, a computer, water bottles, balloons from his birthday a few weeks ago, and musical instruments propped underneath. Compared to the other students in the lab, it’s a little messy, and he’s the first to admit it. But sit down and speak with Parada about his research and it’s clear that he not only knows how to pull information buried in piles on his desk, but also pull information hidden within our brains.

Neuroscience Doctoral Student Francisco Parada

Parada is currently a graduate student in Neuroscience and Psychology in Dr. Aina Puce’s lab, but he didn’t start out wanting to become a scientist.

“For most of my life, I was a musician more than a scientist. I started studying music when I was fifteen in Chile, and I spent more than ten years there doing music,” he said. At his Dad’s request, Parada switched gears to study psychology at the university when he was eighteen but continued a 'double life' until he was twenty one. Psychology in Chile is similar to psychology here in the 1950's or 1970s, Parada said, where researchers are debating if it should be considered a science or not; because the focus is mainly clinical and based on psychoanalysis.

“It didn’t hold my attention, but it also wasn’t interfering with my career as a musician so I kept doing it. Eventually I got to my first neuroscience class -- and it was a milestone.”

His enthusiasm for neuroscience led him to a spot as a teaching assistant for a neuroscience class one hour a week. After two years, the department gave him his own section of the class to teach.

“I was really excited about neuroscience and science in general, but in Chile, it seemed like a dream, that it wasn’t possible for me. The science groups in Chile are really small and why would they pick me when there are kids who were working on this stuff from early on and I had a late interest in this. So I gave it a shot and decided to apply to a MA degree in Chile. Just to see how it goes. Since I was a musician already, I wasn’t worried about stability,” he said.

The scientific community in the MA program was good for Parada. He spent a lot of time in the lab and that’s where he discovered electroencephalography (EEG), a method of measuring brain waves by putting electrodes on the skin to measure brain activity.

Electroencephalography (EEG) equipment

“It’s an older technique,” he said, “but it was mind blowing. You can use it to measure the brain directly and associate brain activity with cognitive processes.”

Parada knew that if he wanted to continue to work in neuroscience he would eventually have to leave Chile and start a Ph.D. program in the U.S. or Europe. Because of his experience with the EEG, he eventually connected with Dr. Tom Busey at IU, who offered him a position in his lab as a manager working with undergraduates completing honors theses. Parada also worked with Dr. Busey and his collaborators to develop an open source eye tracking system, another method to measure gaze activity in the brain. With Dr. Busey's support, Parada became a doctoral student at IU.

Developing an open source eye tracker is a huge break through, Parada said. “Usually the cheapest one is maybe $60,000, which is a lot. The principle itself is not that complicated, in the sense that it uses math to calculate where you’re looking with good accuracy.” Parada and Busey's version requires two cameras and the eye tracking program, which can be downloaded from the internet (http://code.google.com/p/experteyes/), all of which Parada estimates might cost around $300 shopping online.

Currently Parada is collaborating with a graduate student in the Art Department who doesn’t have the money to buy an eye tracker, but who would like to collect data from subjects to figure out what parts of his artwork are most attractive in the hope this will help improve his artwork. Open source also means eye trackers could be used in schools, sports, and other educational settings in ways that have been cost-prohibitive before.

What really blows the mind, however, is what Parada is working on now.

With the help of Dr. Busey, he wrote routines that allow two opposing methods to work together to create eye-tracker-guided-EEG. This allows a researcher to measure brain waves while a person is engaged in self-paced, everyday activities, which is not how it's always been.

“These techniques do not play well together,” said Dr. Puce,. his adviser, “they are like putting a cat and a dog in a bag together. It’s groundbreaking work.”

The EEG connects a hat made from linked together electrodes - it looks like high tech chain mail - with a machine to boost the tiny electric signals coming from the brain, and feeds them into a computer.

“When you measure brain waves from the outside (like with an EEG), because the waves are so small, the skin, skull, and liquid around the brain filters out the waves. Eyes are like batteries. Move your eyes and you send electric waves all over skull and they wash out your data. In EEG, the first thing you tell a subject is to hold still and don’t move your eyes. This leads to really boring tasks,” Parada said.

“What I did was combine the EEG with the eye tracker, which introduces a lot of noise to the brainwaves measured by the EEG. Then we figured out a way to remove the electric signal of the eye movement from the EEG data in order to recover the brainwave data. It’s a method that allows you to do more naturalistic stuff,” he said.

For example, Parada is collaborating with a graduate student at the Stone Age Institute studying stone tool making in hominids and early humans. Making stone tools requires fast decision making (and lots of eye movement) because the subject must hit one stone with another stone in precise movements.

Parada performing with his band

“Using an MRI to scan the brain has been used for this kind of research, but is too slow for the kind of question that the Stone Age Institute group is asking; but the EEG is fast, it can do the job. You can look at data with resolution of milliseconds,” Parada said. “Using the new analytical method, we should be able to connect the subject to an EEG and an eye tracker, have the subject make a tool and see brain waves in real time, while doing real tasks. Theoretically this should work; it currently works in the computer. The next step is getting it to work in the real world.”

Parada may have had a non-traditional route to neuroscience, and he still writes music for a 5-piece Nüjazz/Zeuhl combo (www.baitonik.com), but he thinks he might have found his place in science.

“I wasn't the nerd in the class or the guy with the best grades, but science is perhaps the best place for someone like me. I can be unorganized, or work odd hours, but if I get things done and I innovate, I'm might do a good job as a scientist after all. It’s a perfect fit for me.”

Media Contact: Erika Lee, Director of Communications, The University Graduate School, ebigalee@indiana.edu

The Graduate and Professional Student Organization and the University Graduate School would like to congratulate Francisco Parada on receiving the GPSO/UGS Recognition Award. Students selected for this award were nominated by a faculty member from within their department, and selected by the GPSO and UGS for excellence in their graduate studies at Indiana University.

Dean Wimbush Interviewed for the Chronicle of Higher Education

2010-12-02T14:23:00.001-05:00

The University Graduate School Dean James C. Wimbush was interviewed for an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday while attending the annual meeting of the Council of Graduate Schools in Washington, D.C. Read his thoughts on learning outcomes in graduate education below.

Measurement of ‘Learning Outcomes’ Comes to Graduate School

December 1, 2010, 3:34 pm
By David Glenn

Graduate-level programs were once relatively immune from pressure to define and measure “learning outcomes” for their students. But for good or ill, the student-learning-assessment movement has begun to migrate from the undergraduate world into master’s and doctoral programs. (At some institutions, there is even talk of defining a set of “foundational outcomes” for all graduate students—that is, a set of learning goals that would be analogous to general-education goals for undergraduates.)

On Wednesday morning, as the annual meeting of the Council of Graduate Schools got under way in Washington, three graduate deans led a workshop on assessing graduate students’ learning and using such assessments to improve programs.

Formal assessment for improvement, they said, is more useful and less painful than many faculty members believe. (And in any case, accreditors are insisting on it.)

The three deans sat down for an interview after the workshop.

Q. In doctoral programs with intense mentor-apprentice relationships, the idea of establishing rubrics and other lists of learning outcomes might seem off-key. If I’m a senior professor of comparative literature and I’ve supervised 30 dissertations during my career, I probably know in my bones what successful learning in my program looks like. Why should I be asked to write out point-by-point lists of the skills and learning outcomes that my students should possess?

Charles Caramello, associate provost for academic affairs and dean of the graduate school at the University of Maryland: If you write out lists of learning outcomes, you’re making the invisible visible. That’s really my answer. We’ve all internalized these standards. They’re largely invisible to us. Assessment brings them out into visibility, and therefore gives them a history.

William R. Wiener, vice provost for research and dean of the graduate school at Marquette University, who is currently dean in residence at the Council of Graduate Schools: There’s no way to aggregate and to learn unless you’ve got some common instruments. By having common instruments, we can see patterns that we couldn’t see before.

James C. Wimbush, dean of the University Graduate School at Indiana University: Part of the story has to do with the external enviroment. Because of the decrease in funding for state institutions, because of political pressures from state legislators, we are forced to be much more accountable. Our boards of trustees now are looking for more accountability. They don’t necessarily say, “We want to make sure that you’re doing assessments of graduate programs.” But they’re questioning, Do we have too many graduate programs? We have to do a better job of being accountable for how we use our resources from the state and elsewhere. Assessment is one of the ways of doing that.

To read more:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/measuring/student-learning-outcomes-come-to-grad-school/27552

"Getting You Into IU" Brings Potential Graduate Students to IU

2010-11-29T11:46:00.004-05:00

In October, IU hosted 21 underrepresented minority PhD prospects from around the country for a pre-application visit called Getting You Into IU (GU2IU). The students were selected from a pool of more than 200 applicants and came from either the natural sciences, technology and mathematics, or the social, behavioral and economic sciences disciplines.

Each GU2IU visitor receives a personalized itinerary created in partnership by the graduate program and the University Graduate School. Visitors met with IUB faculty and current graduate students, visited research centers and laboratory facilities, attended classes in their discipline, received information about application for PhD admission and funding opportunities, and visited the Bloomington community.

One applicant wrote “The faculty and staff were great. Everyone was prepared to talk with me, was eager to share their part of IU and truly loved what they were doing. Their enthusiasm was infectious! After visiting it is hard to imagine going anywhere else.”

Getting You Into IU was created in 2007 by Dr. Yolanda Treviño, Director of the IU AGEP program and Assistant Dean of the University Graduate School. The program is underwritten by the President’s Diversity Initiative and coordinated by the University Graduate School.

Winter Commencement Caps and Gowns Available for Order from IU Bookstore IMU

2010-11-29T11:31:00.000-05:00

Winter Commencement 2010

Rental Charges

Bachelor’s and Associate’s apparel: $98.75
Master’s apparel: $108.85
Indiana's 7 percent sales tax will be added to these charges.
Associate and bachelor's degree candidates have the option of purchasing additional stoles of gratitude for $22.65 each plus Indiana sales tax of 7 percent.

Bookstore Orders: Nov. 23-Dec. 15

From Nov. 23 through Dec. 15, graduates must order caps and gowns at the IU Bookstore in the IMU. Go to the clothing service counter on the second floor.

Students may also call the bookstore at (812) 855-0547 but should realize that it is a very busy line and they are apt to encounter voice mail. Calls are generally returned within 24 to 36 hours.

Those who do not order by Dec. 15 must wait until Commencement Day when any remaining caps and gowns will be available for rental on a first-come, first-served basis. Availability is not guaranteed.

Picking Up Your Cap and Gown on Dec. 15, 16 and 17

Caps and gowns will be available for pickup from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Georgian Room on the second floor of Indiana Memorial Union.

For more information on caps and gowns, Winter Commencement and commencement in general:
http://commencement.iu.edu/bloomington/december2010/index.shtml

Collaborating with China: Dean Daleke on recruiting, fellowships and the establishment of a new summer program

2010-11-23T11:24:00.001-05:00

August 2009 - Visiting student researcher Lan Wang from Tsinghua University in Beijing discusses her summer research project with biology Professor Roger Innes.

In mid-October 2010, David Daleke, Associate Dean for the University Graduate School, traveled to China to explore collaborations with top-notch Chinese universities and to recruit graduate students.

His first stop -- the International Graduate Scholars Conference (IGSC) in Beijing, China. The IGSC is sponsored by the China Scholarship Council (CSC), a subsidiary of the Chinese Ministry of Education, and focuses on connecting Chinese doctoral students with research experiences in the U.S. and other international institutions.
At the IGSC, Dean Daleke took part in a recruiting fair where he estimates 600-700 students participated. Additionally, as part of the conference, Daleke met one-on-one with representatives from 15 other institutions from China to explore potential collaboration and the CSC scholarship program.

Two types of scholarship are offered through the CSC. The first is a four-year fellowship for new students entering doctoral programs. Recently the CSC has nearly doubled the amount of support, which now comes close to providing full funding to participants.

“This increase in support has made the CSC program much more attractive to the best Chinese students,” Daleke said. To receive a student on the CSC scholarship, universities taking part in the program only need to provide a fee remission.
The second type of scholarship is a visiting scholars program where current doctoral students at Chinese universities spend one or two years abroad at an international institution like IU, then return to China to finish their research. At IU, it is estimated that more than 20 Chinese graduate students visit IU each year under this program.

Daleke’s journey continued as he traveled to Renmin University in Beijing, Xian Jiatong in Xi’an, and FuDan University in Shanghai with an additional CSC-sponsored program called the IGSF (International Graduate Scholarship Fair). In response to the success of the IGSC, the IGSF sets up one-on-one interviews with potential Chinese graduate students in three different Chinese cities for 46 universities from the US, Canada, parts of Europe, and Australia.

Different Chinese universities are selected for the IGSF each year, and Daleke said this ensures he will meet different local students in each location. Students interested in IU sign up for one-on-one interviews, and “as a result, we had more specific contacts with students than we would have at a standard recruiting fair, and I hope this approach will be more productive in terms of recruiting students in IU. The format also allowed me to give each student more focused advice and recommendations on how to prepare their application for admission.”

“Opportunities like these provided by the IGFC and the IGSC are also excellent exposure for IU,” he said. “We develop partnerships for recruiting students, and it puts our name out there, which is very important for getting good applicants from China. As a result of my recent trip, the University Graduate School passed on 200 contacts to departments as prospective recruits. In addition, we hope that the more in-depth conversations we had will encourage students to apply here.”

Daleke also used the opportunity to further develop partnerships for a program aimed at bringing Chinese undergraduate students to IU for an eight-week summer research experience. This past summer, the program brought in 11 students from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Plans are now underway for Peking and Zhejiang Universities to join the program in the summer of 2011.

“The goal for the summer program with Tsinghua University,” said Associate Dean David Daleke, “was to make a connection with these students and show them what IU is like for graduate school. It may also turn out to be a good vehicle to promote faculty colloborations.”

Most of the visiting students were rising seniors and in this initial year, all the students were placed in labs in Chemistry, Biochemistry, Biology and Medical Sciences but it is expected that the partnership with Zhejiang will be in the social sciences.

“The summer was great,” student Lan Wang, who was part of the first summer exchange program from Tsinghua University, said. “I enjoyed my stay in the lab, everyone was friendly and the project was amazing.”

The seed money to kick-start the program came from the VP for International Affairs, Dean Daleke said, who provided $10,000 to offset the cost of room and board, which is equivalent to $1000 per student.

The Graduate School provided another third of the funding and the host faculty paid the final third. In some cases, departments helped assisted faculty and kicked in some of the money.

“It was great to see such broad support from multiple offices and impressive that faculty were willing to commit some of their research funds to the program,” Daleke said. He hopes that departments will continue to view the program as a recruitment mechanism, as it also gives the faculty as chance to preview potential applicants.

"We want to bring some of the best students from these universities to IU. And if they like what they see, we hope they'll apply."

McNair Scholars in the News: IU student Esther Uduehi named Rhodes Scholar

2010-11-22T11:49:00.002-05:00

Nov. 22, 2010
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/16550.html?emailID=16550

Esther Uduehi

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Esther Uduehi, a senior at Indiana University Bloomington majoring in chemistry and mathematics, has been named a Rhodes Scholar for 2011. She is one of 32 Americans who have been selected for the prestigious academic award.
Uduehi, of Evansville, Ind., becomes the 16th IU student -- and second in as many years -- to receive a Rhodes Scholarship, which provides all expenses for two or three years of study at the University of Oxford In England. (Mutsa Mutembwa of Zimbabwe, who graduated in May, received the 2010 Rhodes Scholarship.)

"Esther is a truly remarkable student and is most deserving of this honor," said IU President Michael McRobbie. "All of us at Indiana University are extremely proud of what she has achieved during her years of study here and are excited for her to continue her academic pursuits at Oxford."

Uduehi, a Herman B Wells Scholar who entered the fall semester with a 3.93 grade point average, was one of three finalists from IU for the award. IU has now had four Rhodes Scholars since 2001.

"It's a great privilege not only to receive the Wells Scholarship but also to represent Indiana University," said Uduehi. "As happy as I am that I won the award, I am equally happy that IU had three finalists, who demonstrated the academic excellence and integrity of this university. I'm looking forward to continuing my career at Oxford and expanding on the great educational foundation that I received at IU."

Uduehi added that she was grateful for the support of her teachers and administrators at IU as well as her family. Her parents emigrated from Nigeria in 1988, the year before Uduehi was born, in hopes of providing a better life for Uduehi, her brother, Joshua, and her sister, Elizabeth, who is a junior at IU.

"This scholarship has meant a lot to me and to my family, and we are extremely grateful for all that IU has done for us," she said.

A former valedictorian at F.J. Reitz High School in Evansville, Ind., Uduehi entered IU in 2007 as a recipient of the Wells Scholarship, created in honor of the late IU Chancellor Herman B Wells and one of the most competitive and prestigious awards offered by any U.S. university. That same year she was also named a National Achievement Scholar and a Senator Richard G. Lugar Scholar, and received the Indianapolis Star Minority Achievement Award. This year, she received the Kenneth R.R. Gros Louis Scholarship, named after the former IU chancellor, and the Council on Advancing Student Leadership Top Ten Student Leader Award.

Uduehi is currently the vice president of IU's Board of Aeons, a 12-member student board that conducts research projects for the president's office. This fall, she also began serving as IU's second-ever Presidential Student Intern. As part of her intern responsibilities, she is a member of a new committee, established by McRobbie, that is examining the university's approaches to teaching and learning and their impact on student achievement.

Uduehi is a participant in IU's Science, Technology and Research Scholars (STARS) program, as well as the McNair Scholars program. She has worked in the laboratory of IU chemistry professor Amar Flood since her freshman year.

The Rhodes Scholarship will enable Uduehi to return to Oxford, where she studied as a visiting student in chemistry and biochemistry last fall. That experience followed a summer spent in Russia as a participant in the U.S.-Russia Global Health Care Study Program.

While at IU, Uduehi has co-founded the IU Minority Association of Pre-Medical Students (MAPS) and the IU Photography Society, served as diversity director for the IU Student Association, interned with the IU Premed Summer Experience Program, served as the first student docent at the IU Art Museum, and conducted teaching internships in the departments of Biology and Mathematics.

Uduehi is interested in a career in medicinal chemistry research and has given several national research presentations, including a presentation earlier this year at the Harvard Medical School.

The Rhodes Scholarships, the oldest international fellowships, were initiated after the death of Cecil Rhodes in 1902 and bring outstanding students from many countries around the world to the University of Oxford. The first American scholars entered Oxford in 1904. Uduehi and her fellow Rhodes Scholarship recipients will enter Oxford in October 2011.

Rhodes Scholars are chosen in a two-stage process. First, candidates must be endorsed by their college or university. More than 1,500 students each year seek their institution's endorsement; this year, 837 students were endorsed by 309 different colleges and universities.

For more on the Rhodes Scholarships, including a list of other 2011 scholars, go to http://www.rhodesscholar.org/.

Below is a list of all of IU's Rhodes Scholarship winners.

IU Rhodes Scholarship Winners

* 1905 Frank Aydelotte
* 1913 Richard Simpson
* 1919 Ernest R. Baltzell
* 1920 Ernest K. Lindley
* 1925 Philip Rice
* 1928 Harlan Logan
* 1953 Joseph B. Board
* 1964 Stephen K. Smith
* 1970 William H. Wolfe
* 1983 Barbara J. Toman
* 1985 Joel Thomas-Adams
* 1994 Zachary J. Ziliak
* 2001 Raju Raval
* 2003 Kathleen Tran
* 2010 Mutsa Mutembwa
* 2011 Esther Uduehi

IU graduate student to premiere haunting new play

2010-11-19T10:00:00.000-05:00

First student-authored work performed in Wells-Metz Theatre

EDITORS: A special Web page devoted to Playing the Bones, featuring an interview with John Drago, can be accessed at http://www.iub.edu/~thtr/2002/Bones/BonesHome.html.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- John Drago is hooked on reality TV.

The Indiana University graduate student just might need a few "survival" skills to make it through the days leading up to the world premiere of his first major playwriting effort, Playing the Bones, on Dec. 6. It will be the first student-authored work to be performed in the new Wells-Metz Theatre of the Indiana University Theatre and Drama Center.

Drago admits he is terrified -- which is surprising coming from a young man who, not long ago, spent his days touring graveyards in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. There, among the tombstones, shadows and howling winds, the third-year M.F.A. student from Louisville began formulating the idea for his new play. Playing the Bones is an eerie, haunting Appalachian tale about an orphan girl discovering the secrets of her past and coming to terms with her own mystical powers.

A relative newcomer to playwriting, Drago, who studied musical theater in college, cites everything from the theatrical works of Henrik Ibsen and Paula Vogel to reality television shows like Survivor as his primary influences. Reality TV? Despite its superficiality and questionable realism, Drago won't write off the modern-day art form. "Even though it's pretty artificial, I love the sound of real people talking," he said. "I love hearing people talk the way they really talk. I think it's a very important skill for a playwright to have."

A coming-of-age story set in the mountains and steeped in the supernatural, Playing the Bones tells the story of a teenage girl, a grieving widower and a scheming crone, all of whom live in a haunted landscape inhabited by a band of restless spirits. Drago says audiences can distinguish between the dead and living by listening to their respective speech patterns -- the dead speak in iambic pentameter; the living in an indigenous dialect that the playwright picked up during his mountain travels.

"My friend, who was a genealogist, and I would go up into these strange towns in the mountains and talk to people you don't necessarily encounter in normal society," explained Drago, who recently turned 25.

The play is being directed by Dale McFadden, director of theatre in the IU Department of Theatre and Drama. McFadden praised Drago's talent for writing effective, accessible dialogue and structuring a story around such a sympathetic main character. "I think the audience will really sympathize with the struggle of this girl and identify with those people in our lives who may be dead but still have a role in our well-being. It's a play that contains an imaginative use of language and transports audience members to a setting that's not in the realm of their usual experience," McFadden said.

McFadden added that he has enjoyed collaborating with Drago as the two prepare the play for its debut in the 236-seat Wells-Metz Theatre, which opened its doors in February. The theatre includes two balconies, movable seating and a flexible performance space that opens up a world of exciting staging possibilities to both playwright and director. "It's been an effective collaboration because John is seeing the play on its feet and learning what can and can't be done in this particular theatre," McFadden said.

McFadden encourages audiences to seize a somewhat rare opportunity to witness the initial production of a new play and "to enjoy, ponder and consider its possible value. In that way the audience is truly serving as the first responder and litmus test of the play's strengths and weaknesses," he said.

Reality has begun to set in for Drago, so forgive him if he suddenly feels alone on a remote island. This is his first "full-throttle" production, and the learning curve has been tremendous, he said. He also knows that in just a few days his play will be judged by a couple of hundred jury members and voted up or down based on whether they are inspired by the language, characters and imaginative world he has created.

It's no wonder Drago is just a little worried.

"It's a very emotionally distressing situation to be in," he admitted with a nervous laugh. "But I certainly believe in the language of this play, in the images, in the world I've created. I have to think that it will be a really effective and moving experience for everyone."

Performances of Playing the Bones are Dec. 6-7 and Dec. 9-14 at 8 p.m. with 2 p.m. matinees on both Saturdays in the Wells-Metz Theatre. Tickets can be purchased in person at the IU Auditorium box office or by phone from TicketMaster.

http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/669.html

Ph.D. student thrives despite health struggle

2010-11-19T09:56:00.001-05:00

By Nathan Miller | IDS
Nov. 18, 2010

Jenelle Dorner has spent years fighting fatigue, malnutrition and pain.

Dorner, a doctoral candidate in neuroscience and psychology at IU, was diagnosed with mitochondrial disease, dystonia and gastroparesis, which combined have left her wheelchair-bound with a surgically inserted tube that helps send nutrition directly to her heart.

Read the rest of the story..

http://www.idsnews.com/news/story.aspx?id=78583&search=graduate%20student§ion=search