Annual Responsibilities

Now that you're a new EEB student (or a continuing one with a bad memory), here's a helpful list of some GENERAL things grad students do each year. The reality will look slightly different for each person and over each year.

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• Summer - sign up for classes for the fall semester

• September - attend TA and general grad student orientations, if applicable

• September/January - pay student fees before the end of the first week of classes

• Late September - fill out your annual review for the department

• February - recruitment weekend, sign up to meet grad student recruits

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• At least once a year - schedule & hold a committee meeting (not always applicable for 1st year students)

• Approx. three months before graduation- submit a graduation application for summer graduation, if applicable. More info here

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Other notes on annual reviews from Brian O'Meara (04/26/21):

• Rationale for this process overall: every student enters the program seeking a degree. The threshold for that are certain courses, passing core, a qualifying exam for PhD, generally three “real” chapters (i.e., not counting intro and conclusion) for PhD and one for masters, and a successful defense and public seminar. There are time limits: the grad school has a max time in program cutoff, there’s the maximum date for GTA support in your offer letter (“support for five years”), etc. If a student is entering year five having not formed a committee or made a plan for what they’re going to research, it’s unlikely (but not impossible) that they will actually be able to finish their degree. There are many factors that can lead to this, but one thing we can do something about is oversight – historically, not all advisors have noticed that students aren’t progressing well, and this system flags potential issues to a group of other faculty so potential issues can be recognized while they’re still manageable. Empirically, something like this was needed – we put it in because some students weren’t progressing well, and were at risk for not achieving their goal of a degree.

• Rationale for asking for career plans for after graduation: the goal is to center the committee’s discussion on the student’s progress towards their goals. Absent this, it is often easy to assume it’s the goal most students report at admission, some sort of faculty position in an ecology or evolution department, but 1) that’s not true for everyone on entry, and 2) it’s definitely not true for everyone on exit. For an R1 faculty job, to be successful it’s useful to have lots of impactful papers, and a history of grant success helps a lot, too. For other positions, outreach matters, products other than papers in glossy journals, etc., but the committee can only look at this if they know what a student is envisioning. It also starts a conversation between a student and their advisor(s) early about goals.

• In practice, this process is most important for students whose progress towards finishing seems to be in trouble. It can have consequences, including dismissal, which does happen, albeit rarely. It helps a bit on the other end, identifying students to nominate for awards. In the middle, it typically has no consequence – there’s no hidden ranking of students that says a student is #17 of 50. Sometimes grad affairs gives advice they feel will be useful to a student; sometimes it’s a bit firmer than advice (“you need a committee for next year – get to it”).

• The evaluation is less formal than that used for staff (including postdocs) and faculty: there people are given scores on various metrics so they can see if they’re meeting expectations for service but exceeding for teaching and not meeting for research. Bad ratings by the head can lead to a process that can get even a tenured faculty member fired.

• If you have suggestions on improving or replacing the grad evaluation process, please let someone know (talk to me directly, talk to other members of grad affairs including the GREBE rep, etc.). Not checking in on how students are doing, or hoping advisors flag problems, hasn’t worked in the past for everyone.