GRAD Classes: Helping Graduate Students Prepare for Their Future Careers

• Topics for the course will include regulations, research misconduct, protection of human subjects, welfare of laboratory animals, data management, and conflicts of interest. Other topics will also be appealing for graduate students, including mentor trainee responsibilities, collaborative research, and authorship. In addition, students will learn peer review, grants, and avoiding predatory journals.

The course will provide 8 hours of in-person ethics training required by NIH and NSF for those working on grants involving human participants.

• The course will be graded pass/fail.
• 1 credit hour

This 1-hour credit course serves as a Topics course within or with connections to professional development. Course topics, to be chosen by the instructor, may vary and rotate depending upon the interest and level of the students. The course may be repeated for credit up to a maximum of 3 hours at the discretion of the instructor.

• Topics include, but are not limited to, knowledge and understanding of campus resources and university structure; enhancing communication skills; time management and strategy; fostering relationships; acquiring skills of resiliency and wellness; all with a view toward the process of professional development.

The course also introduces students to the mission, values, and constituencies of a comprehensive public university, and to ethical and social concerns that they may face as a member of this community.

• 1 credit hour

This course is designed to provide graduate students with opportunities to apply instructional best practices within their discipline through applying pedagogical practice, theory, and principles to develop lesson plans, lead instructional activities, and evaluate mastery of material.

• Course enrollment is restricted to fully admitted degree-seeking graduate students. Individual sections may include additional restrictions.
• Regardless of section, the course requires demonstration of content knowledge within the discipline in which the graduate student will provide instruction.
• Course objectives will be met through supervised teaching experiences, teaching observations, supervised student formative evaluation, and supervisory meetings with course instructor.

Specific sections can focus on the instruction of specific undergraduate courses within the discipline in which the graduate student is gaining experience with instruction.

• 3 credit hours

This course provides graduate students with individualized instruction to facilitate research skills through work on research projects under the supervision of the faculty member.

• Z grade
• 3 credit hours

This special topics course is designed to equip students with skills in grant writing.

• Students will write and submit competitive grant applications.
• Students will identify appropriate research or other qualifying projects for the grants, develop proposals aligned with the requirements of the grants, integrate feedback to enhance the competitiveness of the grant applications, and critique others’ grant applications.

Students successful in the class will be able to clearly communicate the merit of their project and the broader impacts.

• 1 - 3 credit hours

This capstone project course is designed to equip students to apply cross-disciplinary knowledge. Students will integrate two or more disciplines, with guidance from a committee of faculty representing each of the selected disciplines, to complete a project in a nonresearch setting.

The project must engage students to use their unique cross- disciplinary expertise to address a particular theme or goal directly related to real-world problems/needs.

• Z graded
• 1 - 9 credit hours

The thesis is an independent research/scholarly project.

• he student must conduct original research, and the thesis must integrate the scholarly disciplines comprising the student’s interdisciplinary master’s degree.

Students enroll in this course while actively working on their thesis with mentoring from the chair of their thesis committee.

• 3 credit hours