The Graduate Policy Research Committee started meeting the second and fourth Thursday of every month in October to identify areas where policy and procedure are needed, said Jim Gregson, associate dean of the College of Education.
Gregson said GPRC is a policy arm for graduate education and the College of Education.
“We are responsible for developing a doctorial guide, which is an online ‘how to’ handbook for our doctorial students, and keep that updated as policies and procedures change in the college,” said Dammon Burton, interim department chair for the Department of Movement Sciences.
He said the committee also tries to incorporate what is going on nationally in graduate education and how they might need to evolve the program at UI.
“As a committee we support all things that Jim and Dammon were talking about from a committee perspective, policy and programming perspective,” GRPC chair Michael Kroth said. “We don’t actually do any programing except for the things that are college wise like the brown bags, but we support the efforts of the departments and our faculty.”
He said brown bags are an important part of a graduate student’s studies. He also said they provide support and knowledge from other people at the university.
“I did my doctorial work at the University of Illinois and every Friday at lunch we had a brown bag for motivation … and we would have people from literally a dozen different departments show up — usually about 15 or 20,” Burton said. “But regardless of how many classes I was taking, that was always a highlight of the week for me.”
Gregon said it is tough finding a time between Boise’s different time zone and everyone’s schedules to hold these meetings, so they just grab their lunches and listen to presentations while eating.
The first brown bag scheduled for Nov. 15 will feature a faculty member in movement sciences who is the recipient of an internal competitive grant, Gregson said.
“She is going to present kind of what the award contributed to, what she has learned and kind of her thinking about how this will contribute to her research education,” he said. “So it’s not just an isolated effort, but rather she is a beginning faculty member with us so she is beginning this really exciting — I think — research agenda.”
Kroth said they expect the brown bags to promote an interdisciplinary perspective that he thinks a lot of us embrace, but are just not there yet in regards to the practices of the GPRC.
“With full time students, like we have in our department, a lot of what they learn is outside of the classroom — estimates are as high as 70 percent,” Burton said. “So it is creating this community of learners who learn from each other as well as faculty members, providing more opportunities to get teaching experience, research experience, outreach experience (and) community programing experience.”
Erin Roetker can be reached at [email protected]