[Bgsa] seminars

[Carla Essenberg]

Dear fellow graduate students,

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.

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.

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.

-Carla

-- 
Carla Essenberg
PhD Candidate and EEOBGSA President
Department of Biology
University of California, Riverside
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