Public Engagement

This is part 3 of Karen Buhr's report on Civic Engagement in Graduate Education - Departments. Part 2 was posted yesterday.

Create lounge space for grad students

We are all busy and discount the importance of social time, but social time is what builds the networks that create community. Give your grad students a place to come together, share donuts, eat lunch, or just take a break from the rigors of academic life. You’ll be amazed at how simply providing a space can lead to more connected communities.

Create social opportunities for grad students

In addition to space, social activities can enhance the quality of student life. Remember, happy graduates are giving alumni. More than anything, grad students want to feel that they are part of their department and important to their community. Give them a chance to socialize with other students, faculty, staff and administration. Community will grow from these interchanges. The social opportunities can be academic in nature (like academic conferences), mixed academic and social activities (like holding academic competitions around pop culture topics) or they can be purely social (like a regularly scheduled coffee hour). Whatever the activity, both students and the department will benefit from social opportunities.

Create an annual event with another program or school

Find a creative, productive way to bring disciplines together. Look for disciplines that are a natural fit and can complement the educational experience of both programs. An example is the case competitions in the Academic Health Center where students in various health disciplines come together to solve health-related cases. Find ways for practitioners of different disciplines to meaningfully engage.

Bring local leaders in your field to campus often, let students take them to lunch

Students love the opportunity to meet people from the real world and local professionals may provide valuable contacts in employment searches. When you bring professionals to campus, allow students to have informal question and answer sessions or take the professional to lunch. Not only will you build connections between your program and the community, but you will expose students to an excellent opportunity to think about their futures.

Establish electronic and physical community bulletin boards

The transfer of information is an essential part of any community. Facilitate communication within your department. It may be as simple as a physical bulletin board on which people can post used items for sale or as complex as computer discussion boards around critical department issues. Help the communication flow by giving people space to express themselves.

Establish a department listserve or improve the existing listserve

We all hate the amount of e-mail we get everyday. Sometimes it becomes unbearable, but a listserve can help provide important information and build community in the department. There are two ways to make an effective listserve:

• Make it critical to the functioning of your department. If critical advising information and department activities are distributed through the listserve, people will begin to use it. Several departments have made their listserves critical enough to their population that it has become an essential means of communication.
  
• Let anyone post to it, but provide an opt-out. Satisfy those who do not want to participate by allowing them to opt out, but still provide the valuable resource to those that will benefit from it.

Communicate, communicate, communicate

You can never communicate too much. Find ways to encourage communications within your department and communicate often. Where communication flourishes, so will community.