 I think we're about 30 seconds away, so I think we can go ahead and start. Welcome everyone to our last set of all breakout sessions. It's just these two days of my so hard to ask. So I want to welcome everyone to supporting dissertators emotional needs presented by Emily and Heidi. And if you would both like to introduce yourselves and, you know, do your magical facilitation of this workshop, that would be great. Thanks, Terry. Thanks, Terry. So my name is Emily Wookner. I'm the associate director for student experience at the University of Illinois, Urbana, Champaign. And a large part of my job is overseeing the thesis office and helping students through the writing of their thesis and Heidi. My name is Heidi RBC Kalm. I'm an assistant dean of academic affairs at the University of Iowa. And I see so many colleagues on the people and participants list. So thank you very much for coming. I work with Dr. Aaron Kaufman, who is our thesis manager. And together, she and I have really worked to innovate and evolve how we provide thesis and dissertation support. On our campus. And so I'm excited about our partnership with Emily, but also grateful for all of you from whom I've learned so much. Great. And so this presentation really starts, it stems from a conversation. Heidi and I had, I think, two years ago and that we've kept having as time goes on. And we've shared lots of information and resources with each other. And we want to extend this conversation, though, to include you all so that we can all share with each other and really learn from each other and support each other. The big questions that, you know, we're thinking about are what, you know, what is happening for our students at this time? You know, as the title suggests, this is a very lonely process for students sometimes writing the dissertation. They are working on it for months or years. And, you know, it feels very isolating. They feel like they don't have the connections that they used to. And they, especially at the end, they have so much on their plates from looking for jobs to, you know, finding out where they're going to move to what the next steps are. A lot of our students have families too. And so they're trying to balance, you know, work and life. And so this is a very vulnerable time for our students. This is a very stressful time for our students. And so we've really been thinking about what else can we do in our positions? You know, we work with students on the formatting, on the finishing touches of everything. But what can we do to help them in the time leading up to that? What role can we play in supporting our students through these so important milestones? And so that's really where our conversation starts. Yeah, I'm going to add just two things, Emily. I mean, I clearly remember, you know, those of those among us who feel like kindred spirits. And I know a lot of us do, you know, I clearly remember meeting those folks with whom I had an aha moment. And when I saw Emily present at her first USETDA conference and she put that big eye up on the screen. I don't know if anybody else remembers it, but I was like, OK, I want to know you because I can see that you're trying to inspire yourself, inspire students, build morale, keep the momentum, you know, churning, right? And so I just want to echo what she said and underscore that what we hope to talk about with you today is two things, right? How do you celebrate your students at the end? But also then I happened to be a moderator during Lilly's session just a moment ago from Iowa State. How do you also reach your students earlier and try to support them along the way? So it's celebration at the end and supporting them along the way. And so with that, maybe Emily, you want to start our PowerPoint? Yeah. Do we want to do the minty first? Oh, sure. Absolutely. Let's do it. Okay. So do you mind sharing the link in the chat? I don't mind it all and I will absolutely do that. I'm trying to share my screen and it's not letting me. Yes, we just practiced this and it's not working. Do you have yours that you can try? I'll try it. Yeah. My, yeah, what's, do you want to put the code in the chat while I do that? Oh, guess what? I think I'm going to be able to pull up our slides for sure. Good. But I guess I handed the magic powers over to you. I guess you must have, although it's not. So what mine's going to do everyone is I think in order to get to menti, which I have pulled up, it's going to, you're going to see like almost, you're going to see a bunch of gobbledygook for a minute, but let's see if we can make this work. So first it's kind of a nothing screen. And then hopefully it will let me get back to the menti. Let's see. Yeah, this time it's just letting me do the PowerPoints unless actually this is called join a presentation. Do you have it now? Got it. Excellent. Got it. All right. So our first question for everyone is what do you think it is like to write and submit a thesis or dissertation at your campus? Look at how stressful is right in the center. Confusing. This is really great. Yeah. The lack of writing support. I don't see lonely there. I see I see supported. I was just going to say I don't see a single positive word. Disorienting right? That says a lot. Jumping. Does anyone want to comment in the chat or just unmute yourself with what you're seeing in this word cloud? Larry says all too negative. Again, I think most of my, you know, maybe don't need students you know, as you're practically, you know, extremely stressful. I see exciting. I don't know. You know, I mean, we used to mean that, you know, we used to process as we try to make ourselves in their ways. You know, just wondering. Terry, thank you so much for all your comments. It was kind of choppy. I saw that in the comments and I experienced that as well. If you want to either try again or just put some of your thoughts in the chat. You said a lot that is really important. I would love to hear it. What can we do to make it easier? I'm a comment from Deborah. Do we need to be making people jump through all these hoops? These are exactly the kinds of reflections that we were hoping to elicit. Larry says we have a lot of work to do if this is typical. I think that's exactly right. Erica says I'm a PhD student even though I'm completely familiar with the process. It's still incredibly stressful. And I think it's important to separate the writing from the submission of formatting for Deborah. I agree with you. That's a really good point. It could be like what's it like to write on your campus? What's it like to submit? That's a really helpful observation. That's awesome. Ashley, I'm sure we like to say at Iowa that we've tried to take the crisis out of the submission process, right? We can't necessarily take the stress out of writing and dissertation, but can we to Larry's point to I think Deborah's point. Can we take some of that crisis out of the submission? Thank you, Terry. That's such a good observation as well. Yeah, it's interesting. I was reflecting on this and in the thesis submission and deposit process, there are so many deadlines that we have and they're all occurring very rapidly. And so there's a lot for students to be juggling into managing and in each deadline does create a different amount of stress for different reasons. I think and so thinking about, you know, how can we change our messaging to help them through those steps so that it's not like a crisis. This deadline is coming. But like, oh, I've got this. I've already done it. And I think another piece is thinking about students at the very start of the thesis process, right? They finish their preliminary exam and then they're supposed to go write a thesis and it's like, I don't know what to do. How long is it supposed to be? Like, what am I going to talk about? You know, and so they're experiencing emotions in a very different way. And then you've got the students in the middle who are, you know, run, have a slump or, you know, mind block. And so what can we do to be available to students at all different times in all different stages? I think we have another question here that we want to pose. If I can get to it. All right. And what have students told you about this process? What have students told you that this process is like? So in order to add to this, you may have to advance it. Here come the words. Excellent. Yay. And easy right out of the gate. And I think, again, back to the earlier point, you know, we didn't, when we wrote this, this question, what have students told you this process is like? Are we referring to the writing of the dissertation or the submission? And I wonder, you know, part of this session for me is what role can we play in both? Right. Obviously, that was part of what Iowa State recently shared. And I've seen in the chat here since a number of you have written that you've shared, that you've started similar writing support programs at your institution. Obviously, sort of moving how we can help students, you know, forward, right? Or back, whichever way you want to think about it, but earlier in the process for them. I'm seeing a lot more positive things on this one. Exciting. Or is that not as bad as expected? Easier than expected? Submission is easy and help. I like that the word help is, you know, right here. Step by step. I think that's really helpful as well. A lot of steps, but if we provide transparency with those steps, we're being helpful. So this is great. And thank you all so much for participating in our word clouds. And I'll definitely take screenshots of these. And I can share them if anyone's interested. I think Heidi and I, we have a couple of PowerPoint slides that we want to show you of things that we have done. We are still, you know, experimenting, trial and error, trying to figure out what's going to work, what's not going to work, what are our students going to respond to, what are they not going to respond to? And so we want to share some of our things that we've done and then some takeaways that we have from these experiences. One of the things that I've started doing is creating messages of support that I can share with my students. So we have a newsletter that goes out weekly. It's called Grad Links and it includes lots of information like upcoming workshops, opportunities for graduate students, that sort of toolkit for them. And we, I have my own section. It's called thesis tips and every week I give them a tip. And sometimes it's like letting them know that we have formatting resources or that we have a workshop coming up. But I also integrate things such as like taking care of yourself, dedicating time away from your thesis and making that part of your routine. Using campus wellness resources, you know, going to the counseling center if needed the health center or in campus recreation. A few years ago, I had an interview with different colleagues here at the Graduate College and asked them what they wish they had known when they were writing their thesis or dissertation. And I wrote a blog and you see it's gotten 2,000 views. So that's on our website that students can access and they're still looking at it these days. The other piece is actually, so these are things that I've put together. This was a surprise to me. This came through on Twitter a few years ago. Part of at our university, the thesis office oversees the doctoral examination process. And so we appoint all the preliminary and final exam committees. And in our emails that go out to the students to let them know that their committees have been appointed, we have information about, you know, how work preparing for exams can be stressful. And here are campus resources that can help you. And one of our students saw that and took a screenshot of it and shared it with everyone on Twitter. So that was a really fantastic moment, you know, to see that that was read and that it was appreciated by our students. Another thing that we have done is we have shared with our students and we've shared congratulations with our students. These are the eyes that Heidi was talking about. We've gotten very creative lately and we've made gifts of our eyes. And so they're animated and we post them on Facebook and I'll put a link in the chat. It was actually surprisingly easy to do just with Adobe Illustrator and Excel. And so, you know, it can be done. It's not hard. Then, you know, working from home, I had my cat Ruby with me. And so Ruby became the assistant thesis coordinator for our university. And so taking pictures of her with the eye got a lot of likes and support. We have one student that has commented that these posts have kept them motivated, that they like this content and that they inspire them. I also took a couple screenshots here of lines that I've just incorporated into emails that I send to students. So it's like if they've asked me a question about, you know, is my deposit complete? Then, you know, I'll say, yeah. And congratulations on, you know, completing this important degree requirement. Best of luck in the future. To Heidi's point, building community. These are some of the things that we've tried and actually had my first dissertation in thesis meetup last week. I created a Zoom room. And it was geared for students who are especially at the start of their thesis process. And I had about 15 students come and we just talked about what was on their mind. And it was very weird because it was like a very, very successful thing. Because by the end, they had formed their own, you know, productivity group amongst each other. And it was like, okay, this is, this is good. So that was a really successful thing. And then this playlist actually is an idea I stole from my little sister who used to work at IUPUI. And she created a playlist for her students, you know, on their favorite song. And this is something we have in the works for finals week. You know, what music do you like to study to? And so we're hoping to create, you know, poll our students, create a playlist and share it with them around, you know, finals and thesis deposit time. So Heidi, on to you. Yeah, I mean, can you see why I'm so excited to be close to Emily because of all the creative ideas, right, that she comes up with. So my, you know, what we're, what I'm going to share about what we've done at the University of Iowa is a little bit different. But conceptually, we've been on the community and celebration train for a long time. We started thinking, wow, this is an important moment. We want to capture this and celebrate it with the students. When they were doing, there was a form, right? I'm sure you all have them too, that they needed to submit to us in hard copy. And so we were going to take a picture of them when they submitted that form. And we did it for one semester, but we ran out of the bandwidth to keep doing it, right? And so that is one of the challenges that we have faced at Iowa is just capacity. We want to celebrate. We want to build community with students as they are dissertating because we know it's lonely and it's hard. It's arduous, but we lack the capacity to do so. So what have we done instead? Well, we've made some policy updates that we think support student well-being. As I said before, we've really tried to remove the crisis from the process. We don't want this to be a crisis. It shouldn't be hard. They should be able to write a manuscript, defend it to their committee and then submit it to us fairly smoothly and easily. And again, Dr. Aaron Kaufman, our thesis manager has really achieved that. So in 2014, we underwent a major revision of our formatting requirements. We had formatting requirements that literally were from the typewriter era. Now we have simplified things and we allow students to use the conventions of their discipline. Aaron may wish to post in the chat. You can, of course, go out to our website as well and see what we require. But the focus of our work is really on the students, not the manuscript. That's not to say that the manuscript isn't important, but I would ask ourselves in the chat. We've been talking about it already here. To what end does the formatting serve? Now we focus on professional improvement of the appearance of the manuscript. We want it to be readable. We want the publication details to be correct. But do we have requirements like we used to have where we wouldn't allow single space? In Microsoft Word, you had to select that spacing option where it was a specific number. That was one of our formatting requirements. When I learned that, I was like, wow, I don't even know if I could have done this in Microsoft Word. Why can't we just use regular single space? But again, these were just things we had never really thought about. What purpose or to what end does formatting serve? We've created requirement transparency. Again, Aaron has done this on our website. We want students to know it's easy. It's simple. We can help you and support is available. What steps do they need to take? We used to have a two-deposit model. We eliminated that. I won't go into what it is. But again, it was just another typewriter era cumbersome bureaucratic part of the process. We've launched electronic sign-off for dissertators. That's something we did. That's for faculty, actually, through ProQuest. Now we have a remote policy exception. We just keep moving forward. I think the point here is that we try to support students' well-being. By reconsidering and reexamining our processes so that we take some of the challenge words and all that negativity and we remove it from one of the last activities in their academic career. I'll be real quick on the next slide. The other thing I want to mention is we have really discovered how inequitable some of our formatting requirements or some of our requirements might be. We did not necessarily require students to come see us in person before the pandemic, but it was the only option available to them. So they had to come to our office to meet with Dr. Kaufman for as long as it might take. Think about what that means for anybody who's a part-time student who's working, anybody who has children. We are a 9-to-5, 8-to-5 business office who can't take enough time during the day and who even has to come across campus because the work they're doing in their lab is either extremely demanding or their PI might require it. Now Dr. Kaufman has tripled or quadrupled the number of support appointments that she is providing to students simply because she uses tools like Dropbox and Zoom. Because she's taken everything electronic, the equity that we believe we've been able to offer students and the access is transformative. It's incredible and we won't go back actually. We won't go back to in-person appointments simply because we can serve our student population better by doing it through Zoom and digital virtual. And I think one of the things that Heidi and I were talking about as we prepared this is that you don't have to do enormous things. You don't have to go, I saw in the chat the talk of the bell and that's a great idea. You don't have to go by a bell and hang it on your campus and ring it. You can just sending a line in an email that just lets the student know, I saw you, I'm happy for you, I support you. I sometimes during my format reviews and when I send corrections to students or when I don't send corrections, sometimes I get lost in reading or looking at what they've done and I'll sometimes drop them a note that says, oh, this is really interesting. I can't wait to learn more and they appreciate that. They really like that I've taken the time to notice what they've done. They're not just a number of a thesis that I've color on my eye. They are a student who has done something amazing and I want to acknowledge that and share that with them. So you can do tiny, small things can make a huge difference. And I think Heidi, you said that you started adding these sorts of lines to emails at 1.2 as well, right? So we would like to engage you all in some more conversation. This chat is like, I can't even keep up with it. I love it. Thank you so much for sharing these ideas and I hope we can get a transcript of this to share with everyone. We have another fun tool that we would like to engage you all with and it is a Jamboard through Google. Heidi, do you have that link? I will put it in the chat right now. And we'd really like to just engage more with some of these questions that we have and just share. This Jamboard is a really great way for us to collect ideas and again share them later on. Now if you haven't used Jamboard before, what we'll do is right here on the left side of the screen. I don't think my clicker is going to work so you can see it. There's a little thing that's a sticky note. There's a little card. It's underneath the pointer and you can type in an answer to that question and it will appear on our Jamboard so that we can collect our thoughts. So our first question for you is what are some of the unique needs that dissertation and thesis writers have? Oh, this one, I like validation that they are doing things right. That is a question that I think comes up a lot, especially in the perfectionism, right? We have students that focus on little details of their work and need this reassurance that this is what's going on and that they're doing things correctly, that they're doing the things that their PIs want them to be doing in the right way and that's when they get wrapped up in their thoughts and wrapped up in the perfectionism and so I constantly have to remind them this is not the end. This is just the beginning. All these ideas that you have, they will be here tomorrow when you're done writing your thesis and depositing. This is what you need to do to get this paper done. You can revisit all of those ideas later on and every time we have this conversation with a student, they're just like, yeah, that's right and you can tell that some relief has been taken off of them. This is such rich information. I mean, I am so grateful to be part of this conversation today. Thank you, everyone. I'm just marbling too at how much expertise is in this community related to student support. Again, when you think about what is the work that we do, obviously the work is, the manuscript is part of it. I'm adding requirements, but look at everything that everyone has been doing to support students and to center our work on students. It's really incredible. We've got nine minutes left, I think. We want to maybe do another one of these and then just maybe have some time for chat. Yeah, sure. Which question were you thinking? We have a couple. What about, what if we start, we end with this one? Because I think that this one is great and it's the idea of going forward looking. So this is our last question and thinking about what we can do, you know, what we can... Oh, Heidi, I've been broken up for you. You've been broken up for me the entire time. So thinking ahead, you know, what partnerships can you develop or can we develop to help new possibilities in this area? So this is the fourth board and so you can click to that through here. So what are some things that we can, some partnerships we can develop, whether that's locally for you on your campus, whether that's broader with people in this network or, you know, others? I think one of the things to keep in mind is that we don't have to do this alone. You know, we can find others to help support us, whether it's, you know, providing pamphlets for our students or doing workshops for our students. We've got some great ideas on here. Campus connections, furthering campus connections. More departmental support, partnerships with the library. That's one takeaway that I've had from this conference is there are so many partnerships that have been developed between graduate colleges and libraries and I think that those are really important. We both work so closely together and so I think it's great to have those close connections, not just in the transfer of documents, but in, you know, to connect with them personally and get to know them personally so that can work together to help. And I think the really big sticky note in the bottom center of, you know, is there more that, you know, through this community, USETDA, that we can do to stay connected across the year. And I think that that's something I'm definitely interested in and keeping these conversations open throughout the year, not just at the conference that, you know, it's a wonderful conference that we're meeting at, but, you know, we are still going to be working with students throughout the year. What else can we do to support each other and to support our students through this process? Oh, where do I use the I? So we, I have an I, I printed out and I just, I use it. It's usually hanging on my door so when students walk by they can see the I have been at home so we haven't had that. But we post it on Facebook, we post it on Twitter, Instagram. Sometimes we post progress updates so sometimes we'll, when we're ramping up the I will be just a little bit full and then by the end we show the whole I. Heidi, do you want to add anything? I don't know if Heidi can hear me. I'm really worried about myself. I'm sorry, I've been new. Actually, so there's a couple of outcomes. As a chapter. In theory, I, I just, I wish we had a talk. Come on, please, but what? We have meeting on monthly, on student successors. We're, we're, you know, sorry, saying something. To, I'm not just, that's formatting again now. I sort of minimize the, you know, the forms of formatting. But amplifying, right? In augmenting. In augmenting. What else is that we do? And kind of the series. Plans that we have to support on student success. How would we go about organizing ourselves to do something like that? So Heidi was saying that she really likes the idea of creating another group like, like Larry has mentioned. And so how could we go about doing that? What would you all think about doing that? And would anyone be interested in participating and what are next steps? You all think. Yeah, so I think. Hi, Deesons, there's been interest. Perhaps we can bring this to the, the board at our next meeting and discuss if this is something that, you know, we want to support and create. And perhaps we can use the list serves and everything to, to let everybody know and, and collect names in interest for the group. So I think we're getting close on time. Does anybody have any questions or comments, final comments that they want to share? I'm still startled. I wonder, I'm like, if you try speaking. Yeah, I am. Maybe the screen share would fix it. Yeah. Exactly. I'm sorry about that. I don't think there's anything I can do. But I just want to say thank you everyone for all the ideas and the conversation today. And I look forward to thinking together about how we can reimagine our groups. Reimagine our groups that we have and maybe purpose them for additional conversation and collaboration and ideas changes. Yeah, I echo that. Thank you all so much for coming to our session and for giving such great feedback and doing our, our polls and jam boards. We really appreciate everything and for participating in the chat. So thank you all so much. Thank you for coming to our conference. I think it's the end of the day for us. And we really hope to connect with you all in the coming year.