5 Week Meditation Class Offered for UND Students

UND’s Women in Science invites you to their meeting

Introducing the GGF Young Professionals

The Graduate School would like to introduce you to the Greater Grand Forks Young Professionals – an organization that we believe many of our UND graduate students would like to learn more about. If you are looking for fun ways to network, leadership opportunities or ways to get involved in the community, then GGFYP is for you.  In an effort to bring together town and gown, we invited GGFYP to share a blog of introduction.

I have one question for you: “YP… Why Not?”

I suppose I should back up and introduce myself. My name is Stacey Heggen, and I’m the Executive Director for the Greater Grand Forks Young Professionals, or as we like to call ourselves, YP. Consider this your invitation to join us!

Greater Grand Forks Young Professionals, or GGFYP, is a nonprofit group dedicated to helping the region’s young professionals get more involved in their community, stay connected to one another and giving them a bigger voice. To our members, we offer volunteer opportunities and a way to network with other young professionals. To our community, we offer our energy and enthusiasm. GGFYP is involved in events such as ArtSee, the annual showcase of area artists, Beans on the Bank, a chili cook-off and Launch Grand Forks, a survey of young professionals and their hopes for the region.

Simply put, The Greater Grand Forks Young Professionals are both young and young at heart. We care about our community, and we represent the interests of the 20-40 year olds in our area. We are made up of college students, pencil pushers, parents, and people whose collars come in many colors. We love living here and we think other people should too. We plan some two dozen events throughout the year for our members to network and learn. Through our committees, our members are able to get involved in both GGFYP and the community.

What does it take to be a member? Committing to:

• Launch Grand Forks. This means looking at your community through the lens of possibility. It means encouraging our children, our leaders, and our neighbors to think bigger and more optimistically about Grand Forks’ future. It means valuing the people, places, and quality of life in Grand Forks and instilling the community with a renewed sense of pride.

• Be supportive. Be actively involved in the organization and represent the interests and beliefs of the organization. Here are some ideas on how to be involved: raise your hand for leadership opportunities, step forward with new ideas, attend events, invest in another member – personally or professionally, recruit other members, help secure funding, add ideas to this list.

• Pay up. Pay your dues when your dues are due. ($35/year- basically a steak dinner on a Saturday night) That’s it.

We believe in empowering our members to take on leadership and organizational roles for different events with our different committees. Board members and committee chairs are elected positions, but anyone can join a committee or more than one, if the volunteer bug has bit you hard.

• Board of Directors

• Community Involvement

• Marketing Committee

• Professional Development Committee

• Programs Committee

• Social Committee

Again, we encourage anyone and everyone to join us, whether you are in the professional working world or the professional student world. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me: Stacey@ggfyp.com. Our website, www.ggfyp.com, also has more fun information about our group. We hope you will join us!

And if you have a minute, check out a couple of their videos by Matt and Michaela.

Upgrades add a new level of interaction with Grad Stories

For the past six months, The Graduate School has been developing a web site using the Omeka platform, as one of the lucky alpha testers. Our web site hosts Grad Stories, a collection of interviews of students and alumni in a variety of graduate programs at the University of North Dakota. Omeka is designed for use in collections and is particularly suited to museums, libraries, archives and educational institutions. It is open source software, is incredibly flexible, easy to learn and have given us one element of The Graduate School’s efforts to build a graduate community here at UND.

Alpha-testing their server hosted software had some limitations, but is a suitable option for those who don’t wish to take on some of the coding and development that is available in the “.org” alternative. Nevertheless, we built our site, learned to use the software and have implemented a marketing initiative that has been sitting on the back burner for the better part of two years, so we are thrilled to have it publicly available and continuing to build.

Alpha testing allowed Omeka to gather valuable feedback from a wide variety of users to allow them to make some very nice software developments for the launch of the beta version. This means that users can now sign up for an Omeka account, build their own sites, and host it on Omeka’s servers from the low, low cost of free, or select from very cost friendly packages that vary according to storage and number of sites.  One of the great new developments allows us to accept contributions from our readers, making it a truly user-generated, dynamic exchange. Our project asks for stories by students of our programs – to share their experiences – so that prospective students will gain a sense of what it’s like to be a graduate student and even learn what paths our graduates have taken.

We are putting the finishing touches on that plugin and hope to be able to accept contributions by the end of the month. So if you have a great story, start thinking about sending us your paragraph or two, and a profile pic. You might end up on our Grad Stories web site! We’ll also continue adding our interviews and some interesting historic stories too, so check in to http://gradstories.omeka.net

Tomorrow is Graduate Education Day at UND!

I decided to save our conference information until tomorrow, and instead, I’ll give a plug for two graduate focused activities happening on Wednesday hosted by different groups on our campus.

The first, you may remember from a previous post. UND’s Office of Instructional Development is presenting Innovative Approaches to the Graduate Curriculum: Bridging the Gap at their On Teaching lunch seminar tomorrow.

The second event is a panel discussion presented by the UND Chapter for the Association of Women in Communications. It is targeting graduate students who may be feeling a little lost or overwhelmed, especially as we approach the end of the Spring semester. I have included their media release outlining the details. Dean of The Graduate School, Dr Joseph Benoit is one of the panel guests.

“Panel Discussion on UND Graduate Student Support & Mentoring – I’ll Never Make it Through Graduate School: Student Support and Mentoring“

Have you or a fellow graduate student ever wondered what, if any, services exist to help support UND graduate students? Has juggling a full load of classes, GTA demands, lengthy reading lists and for some, family obligations, left you feeling frazzled and exhausted to the point of questioning if it’s worth the trial and tribulation? Are you a friend or family member living with a graduate student, or have you considered enrolling in graduate school yourself?

If you can relate then save the date: Wednesday, April the 28th and join us for the Panel Discussion entitled: I”ll Never Make It Through Graduate School: Student Support and Mentoring, sponsored by the Association for Women in Communications.

Designed to help graduate students, potential graduate students, their families and friends, this event offers a panel of experts willing to make suggestions and answer questions. Speakers include Joseph Benoit, Dean of the Graduate School, Lisa Burger, Director of Adult Reentry and Student Success Center, Mark Thompson, Director of Career Services, Richard Fiordo, Professor of Communication, Kathleen Dixon, Director of Women Studies, Kristen Borysewicz, Reference and Research Services and Sandi Luck, Counseling Outreach.

Plan to attend from 4 to 5:30 at the Memorial Union Lecture Bowl to enjoy some light refreshments and discover how you can make graduate school less stressful and more enjoyable, no matter what your connection with graduation might be. Bring questions for the panelists and take a moment to fill out a short questionnaire about your experiences. The questionnaire will help the AWC conduct a research project to identify the needs of graduate students at UND.

So mark your calendars for tomorrow, Wednesday 28th for the lunch time seminar, or a panel discussion later in the day. And best of luck to all of our graduate students who are preparing for finals.

Python: Part II

A week ago I posted an event that was held during The Graduate School‘s 2010 Scholarly Forum. Today, I have a cross-post to a blog by Gökhan Sever, our graduate student who ran the very successful Python & Scientific Computing tutorial during the 2010 Scholarly Forum. You can read his blog post about the event here. Congratulations to Gökhan!

Fellowship opportunity for current graduate students

We received this notice from Dr. William Bradley, the Assistant Vice Provost for Academic Affairs of Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU). It sounds like a great program, and we wanted to let you know about it.

Yearly, MTSU provides at least two Underrepresented Minority Dissertation Fellowships.  The Fellowship is for a one-year, faculty contract for $30,000 plus benefits, with teaching responsibilities of one course per semester.  It is for individuals who have completed their comprehensive exams and are preparing to write their dissertations.

If you are interested in exploring this opportunity, please follow this link, click on the hot button “Faculty Job Openings” and then click on the title of the position.