Management: From Infancy to Adolescence: Seven Lessons for Creating a Sustainable Graduate Student Orientation Program

Abstract

In recent years, academic librarians have been strengthening the suite of orientation opportunities they offer students and placing a priority on familiarizing them with collections and services to support their academic endeavor. At most universities, the primary-if not the exclusive-target of these efforts is the undergraduate population. Yet graduate students also need a thorough orientation to their postgraduate environment and what the library has to offer. But for a variety of reasons, that audience can be shortchanged. In this column, Harriet Lightman provides an overview of a successful program crafted specifically for doctoral students at a research university. Lightman shares her success story, as well as the lessons learned throughout more than a decade of adapting the program to meet students' changing needs.-Editor A t the start of this millennium, emerging formats were shaping a new information landscape, one that heralded a change in library collection development, management, and content as well as instruction, reference service, and outreach. Scholars, too, were beginning to understand the enormous potential of these new formats to transform traditional modes of discourse.To address these changes and underscore the library' s role in this transformation, librarians, faculty, administrators, and information technology professionals from Northwestern University Library (NUL) and the university' s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences (WCAS), in collaboration with the Information Technology (IT) Division, launched an innovative training program aimed at incoming doctoral students in humanities disciplines.1 This program, which began in 2002, was preceded by work done in WCAS to assess humanities scholars' knowledge of and skill with emerging technologies and by several other pilot programs. The 2002 event was yet another initiative, this one aimed at engaging incoming humanities doctoral students with faculty, librarians, and IT staff who could explain and demonstrate the role of technology in shaping a new scholarly landscape. Humanities faculty who were already engaged with digital technologies showcased their own projects; librarians and faculty partnered to demonstrate the seriousness and solidity of electronic resources. The day was capped by discussion.Because the planning and growth of the program are well-documented elsewhere, 2 the intention of this column is to highlight the lessons learned about event organization and the need for continuous adjustment to each of the major elements, from the smallest detail to the very philosophy behind the training. Now having just finished its twelfth year, the program' s longevity speaks to its success. But success did not come easily. A willingness to discard elements that were

Graduate Student Orientation:

“…Graduate students have indicated that meeting with their faculty advisor prior to the beginning of classes was valuable in preparing for their academic and professional responsibilities (Taub & Komives, 1998). Academic librarian Harriet Lightman (2015) shared programming focused on acculturating graduate students to the resources and practices of research, which included opportunities for students to interact with peers, faculty, and administrators.…”

“…Grounded in the context of socialization, GSOP initiates a process of dual enculturation into students' individual academic sphere and the broader institutional community (Poock, 2006). GSOP is easily thought of as characterizing a deeper focus on developing students into academics and researchers (e.g., Lightman, 2015), while orientation at the undergraduate level can be seen as introducing job preparation or career exploration more broadly. Despite the more academic emphasis, GSOP can address the cocurricular, intersectional needs of the various graduate student demographics through multiple facets of programming (Poock, 2006;Rapp & Golde, 2008).…”

Description, Assessment, and Outcomes of Three Initial Interventions Within a National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT): Onboarding Event, Career Exploration Symposium, and Multidisciplinary Introductory Course

“…The existing literature includes several reports that focus on the onboarding and orientation of graduate students [2][3][4][5][6]. These reports target the orientation of graduate students at the university, college, and/or department levels [2][3][4][5] or the onboarding of graduate students in research groups [6].…”

“…The existing literature includes several reports that focus on the onboarding and orientation of graduate students [2][3][4][5][6]. These reports target the orientation of graduate students at the university, college, and/or department levels [2][3][4][5] or the onboarding of graduate students in research groups [6]. Notably, these publications discuss a number of best practices and make several recommendations vis-à-vis graduate student orientation and onboarding efforts.…”