Dear fellow graduate students,<br><br>The EEOB faculty discussed seminar requirements at their meeting last Friday and made some decisions. They have decided to institute a sign-up sheet for the Thursday seminar and require attendance at 7 out of the 10 seminars per term for credit, as they are already doing for Lunch Bunch. On a happier note, they also have decided to reduce the requirement for both of the seminars from being required every term to being required for 5 quarters prior to advancing to candidacy and 12 quarters prior to completing a PhD. This is not yet in place but assuming this change is approved, there should be an option to take advantage of this in the future. The thinking behind this change is that students sometimes need to miss seminar because of teaching commitments or research off campus - the faculty still hope that we will attend seminar regularly when we are able, even if we are not required to do so.<br>
<br>I brought up at the meeting some of the concerns that people had communicated to me - i.e., that some students feel that the seminars are not always a good use of our time, at least compared to other things we could be using that time for, such as research, and that poor faculty attendance suggests to us that many faculty share that view and consequently makes us more reluctant to attend the seminars. The faculty were concerned that students see the seminars in this light and wished me to communicate to folks what their rationale behind requiring seminar attendance is: the purpose of the seminars, in their view, is to give us a broad perspective on the entire field encompassed by our graduate program. Some of the faculty pointed out that when you interview for a faculty position, you need to be prepared to converse intelligently with the existing faculty, many of whose research will be quite distant from your own, so being familiar with the research being done outside of your own sub-field is important for your job prospects. Several faculty also responded to our complaints about poor faculty attendance - they wished to point out that they have already gone to many seminars on a broad range of topics and therefore already have some of the breadth of knowledge that they feel is important to impart to us as we are beginning our careers. Some of them also have other departmental seminars to attend. <br>
<br>I think the future of Lunch Bunch is still open to debate - at any rate, I know that the faculty are divided about what should be done with it - so we should go on thinking about how these seminars fit into our professional development and whether we'd like them to change. In the meantime, I'm afraid we're stuck with the sign-up sheets.<br>
<br>-Carla<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Carla Essenberg<br>PhD Candidate and EEOBGSA President<br>Department of Biology<br>University of California, Riverside<br>