 I would like to welcome you to today's event. It's really delightful to see you all here today. Just a few words about our location. So there are restrooms for women and for men on either side of the amphitheater, and there's an accessible restroom available by third floor on the east side of the building. This is an event in three parts. It's somewhat provocatively titled, It's Time to Rethink Graduate Education. In the first part, I would like to motivate this work and its aims. And then in the second part, we'll have plenty of time, your 20 minutes, 15, 20 minutes for us as a group to have questions, answers, discussion around these issues that I will try to raise for you today. And then afterwards, we're gonna reconvene to the other side of the fourth floor where we'll be able to see some posters put together by kindly put together by our colleagues, both from across the university and here at Rackham. And we'll also have time for some refreshments and an additional conversation. So I'd like to begin today by asking you to imagine two members of the Rackham community, a student and a faculty member. This student has seen the highs and lows of graduate education, the pleasure of the discoveries that are part of the dissertation, the joy of having a deep relationship with a faculty member. But at the same time, has talked about some frustrations and difficulties. For example, being put so on the back foot by the results or the experience of a qualifying examination, that this student described that research and scholarship progress really ground to a halt for three months after that qualifying exam while the student processed and recovered from that experience. The same student we're imagining later on in that, in the dissertation process was interested in learning a technique from another faculty member down the hall and wanted to spend just a short period of time in that member's lab to try to learn that technique which wasn't available in their own research group. But finding that, making those connections and the way to do that, being a really difficult challenge and impossible in that case. The faculty member tells a really interestingly a complimentary story. They talk as well about the highs and lows, about the experience of the discoveries that lead to peer reviewed publication, about the pleasure of seeing students develop skills, make discoveries, gain the experience needed to go on to make discoveries out on their career paths. But also talks about some frustrations and difficulties, such as, for example, feeling so very unprepared to help a student that was interested in a career outside the academy since that faculty member had spent their own career or whole career inside the university. And just feeling unprepared or it was difficult to make those kinds of connections and be helpful to the student. And in another instance and working with a student over a long period of time, seeing that student come in to a meeting or a research meeting and having that student present so differently at that moment, act so differently that the faculty member knew that that student that they needed that the faculty member needed to accompany that student to caps that day. But then when the student returned, being deeply unclear and uncertain about how to go about helping that student with those challenges and while making academic progress towards the future. So I've asked you to imagine these two students but these two students are actually me. And so the story is a student is me in 1991. Take a quick look because this is the one and only time you'll see this picture. And that was my story as a graduate student. And also the story of the faculty member is my story as a faculty member here at the University of Michigan. And I mentioned those two stories for a few reasons. One of them is that it represents my own personal understanding of some of the work and the aims that I'd like to speak to you about today. But I also think it's interesting because I think I'm probably not the only one that could tell a story of that kind who's here today. I think with the proper translation from my discipline to your discipline, I think these stories represent something that is quite common across the academy. And in fact, these stories describe both the strengths of the model of graduate education that we use here at Rackham and University of Michigan but also some of the pressures that are facing it. If you think about it, our model of graduate education at its core relies on a deep intellectual connection between the faculty member and the student. It's often called the apprenticeship model of graduate education and it's been tremendously successful. It's more than a century old. We have some images here that show that. It arose as an abdication of German research universities. Under President Angel, Michigan led the way as the doctorate became the leading signifier of academic excellence. The quality of graduate programs became a key indicator, characteristic determining institutional reputation and Michigan and other universities produced just this unprecedented burst of creativity, research discoveries and new understandings about people and society. Now this model of graduate education drew then and continues to draw both students and faculty from around the world to come here to join us. I think despite the many contributions of this model that's inspired both in the past and even today, we know that today there are current pressures that are building up in it, that have been building up in it over time. These pressures, we at Rackham have spent the last year thinking about them and indeed I think we've lead the national conversation about this future of research based graduate education, both masters and doctoral. We've developed this understanding through conversations with you as faculty and students and staff. It's been informed by our own data and surveys we conduct to understand the experiences in graduate school. It's been informed as well by the national conversation, by national academies reports, by foundation reports, also by discussion with our peers in the Big Ten and the AAU. So I'd like to highlight just a few of the most pressing dynamics that I think should inform our vision of the future. I think perhaps the most important pressure is that there's a mismatch between the idea of this apprenticeship model and what our students are actually doing with their degrees. Our data show that more than half of Michigan doctoral recipients pursue careers that are not on the tenure track. This to me represents a tremendous source of success. The skills and understanding that our students are developing can contribute in a variety of sectors in the private sector, in nonprofits, in government service, and indeed in academia. So this is really a strength, but at the same time, these career pathway stats have complex explanations. It's true that the number of PhDs produced each year outpaces the number of available academic positions in some fields. And furthermore, I think it's fair to say that attaining an academic position has become extremely competitive in nearly all fields. I think there's another dimension, however, that we consider as well, which is that many of our students already arrive here and tending to seek careers outside the academy. Of course, they come here to perform excellent research and scholarship with faculty, but their desired career paths are not in academia. And even in cases where they are seeking roles in a university setting, students might well be drawn to roles that are different than the ones that we ourselves as faculty hold. These might be positions of primarily undergraduate institutions or other professional roles at the university. So I think in this way, the literal idea of an apprenticeship model as one in which the apprentice assumes the role of the teacher and mentor is under increasing pressure here at the University of Michigan. I think there are other pressures, a number of which are outlined here in the headlines. Master's training has struggled to keep up with the changing needs of society and to develop new programs in emerging fields as well as accommodate the growing number of students who want to seek research-based master's degrees. You can really ask the question, do we have the educational methods and systems that can keep up with the pace of change of master's education? There is increased public skepticism about the benefits of evidence-based research. There are growing concerns about the affordability of graduate education. There are reports about challenges around the mental health of graduate students that have been impuring with increasing frequency in the national and trade press. In fact, some of our own data here at the University of Michigan find instances of depression and anxiety presenting at a very high rate among graduate students. And finally, there are rare but unacceptable instances of misuse or abuse of the faculty-student relationship that is really central and core to this model. So those are pressures, but I believe that we have an opportunity here at the University of Michigan. Given our scope as a world-class research institution, as well as our position of leadership in graduate education on the national level, I think that we can respond to these pressures by seeking to transform the model of graduate education. So why do I think we have this opportunity? I think first and foremost, most importantly, society has never had a greater need for the advanced training represented by research-based graduate education. For the evidence-based science, for expertise that cuts across multiple areas, for thinking from the social sciences and the humanities that can address deep societal problems, and for the understanding that helps us communicate across difference. How will we address the complex societal problems now in 2020 and 2030 and 2050 without the deep advanced training that we provide our students that we mentor and train? So second, I think the University of Michigan itself is a unique place to undertake this work. We understand the nature of the pressures we are facing. We have good data that identify them, and we know that you are aware of them because we are hearing about them from you. And third, I think the other question to answer, the other opportunity is, why do this now? I think the reason for this is that right at this moment here at Michigan, many efforts are already underway to think and innovate around these pressures. I think you would be surprised by how widespread these efforts are across campus. In fact, one of our purposes of this today's event is to identify for you the extent to which these efforts are already nesting on campus. In fact, I think when you look at them as a whole, you can realize that there's a kind of movement that is already underway. What we wanna do here today, and going forward in RACM, is coordinate that movement and give it shape. We need something to connect and support these efforts so that they can be amplified in a way that can benefit all students in RACM and all programs in RACM. We see our role in RACM as supporting this movement. It's consistent with our mission, which is to support the graduate student experience and the discoveries of our students. It's consistent with our values of intellectual exchange, innovation, and evidence-based practices. So to respond to those pressures and seize this opportunity, I think it's time to leverage our collective strength. In fact, indeed, it's time to rethink graduate education. So in rethinking graduate education in this way, we have three beliefs. The first is that graduate education should be student-centered. So what I mean by this is that students own scholarly research interests, their needs for academic and professional development, and their career aspirations are increasingly incorporated into curriculum and training. Of course, the idea of student-centered graduate education is already implicit in the old apprenticeship model. But at the same time, I think student-centered means something more. The key point is that students have the space for their own aspirations to be incorporated into their curriculum and their educational goals as they work with faculty. I think placing students at the center in this way recognizes the changing circumstances and challenges that our students face in pursuing their scholarly interests and their career pathways. Second, I think this innovation to support the graduate academic enterprise should be faculty-led. Emphasizing the importance of faculty leadership recognizes the disciplinary diversity of our campus. The fact that curriculum is best tailored to the specific needs of students by the faculty members who create, work, innovate, and collaborate with students in those fields. Finally, third, I think this work should be RACM supported. This support so that faculty can have the assistance and partnership to develop ideas and move them forward. This is indeed RACM's mission and one that we pursue collaboratively around the university. We know that for faculty members who are stretched in so many ways in their roles at the current moment, finding the time for these efforts is difficult, even though that this is work that we know that you want to do. That's why RACM will commit resources to help. The resources are our staff expertise, our research-based data and understanding, our cross-campus connectivity, and our funding. We're optimistic by reimagining the graduate academic experience as student-centered, faculty-led, and RACM supported, that you can generate real change that will help us recruit the best students, increase their accomplishments within graduate programs, and send and launch them into sectors of society so as to generate new discoveries and understanding. So what I would like to do in the next moment is just briefly highlight a few programs across Michigan and here at RACM that are responding to these changing conditions of graduate education that I've identified. I want to invite you to hear from your colleagues and to see their posters about these initiatives during our reception that will follow the discussion that we have. So the first example I would like to offer is to consider a faculty-led collaboration that is bringing together teams of students from environmental engineering and the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning to collaborate on the technical and societal challenges of planning, building, and managing wastewater and stormwater systems in urban environments. Through this experience, students realize how their own discipline uses specific terminology, how it identifies problems and proposes solutions. These experiences, they learn how these experiences are different from other disciplines and they learn how to navigate those differences. At the same time, they also learn the importance of managing both their own expectations and that of collaborators as they engage in this kind of experiential work. I think this kind of educational opportunity leverages one of the tremendous benefits of the University of Michigan. It combines, it kind of integrates our strength in physical, biological sciences and engineering with our strengths in social sciences and humanities. I think faculty love to have these interactions and graduate students are asking for them. This is exactly the kind of innovation that can meet what students are asking for as part of their education. As another example, in the Ford School, teams of public policy master students are participating in what's called the Strategic Public Policy Consulting Course. In the course, they apply classroom knowledge to work on projects with partners in real world settings as well as gain new skills and experiences that employers value. So this kind of work has included collaborations with the city of Ann Arbor, the Washtenheim Intermediate School District and the Downtown Detroit Partnership. And the Ford School has recently opened up this course to graduate students and other UN professional programs. And here as well, I see a tremendous opportunity which is to connect research-based degree students, doctoral students, research-based master students with professional schools. Both of these communities have something to learn from each other. And I would see that this is, the Ford's program is an example of that. And you'll see another poster by the law school as well. That is another example. As a third example, I would like to talk about the Department of Comparative Literature, which has launched three related initiatives to help students integrate professional interests and activities into their academic program of study. They've introduced a graduate certificate in critical translation studies to explore translation in part as a vital skill for professional development. They took over editorial leadership of an international journal dedicated a literary translation that is edited by graduate students and supervised by UN faculty. And they're also piloting a departmental program that offers a stipend for working in a part-time internship in one semester. Again here as well, I think this initiative represents a way in which additional experiential experiences are integrated with deep disciplinary training in a way that will allow all students, no matter what sectors of interest to them to pursue their career aspirations. As a final example, I would like to talk about the neuroscience graduate program, which in collaboration with CRLT players, and this is two players that you've seen acting here. They recently implemented a new workshop that implements a requirement that faculty and doctoral students undergo directed training to address issues related to gender harassment. They learn how to recognize gender harassment, how to change behaviors related to it, and how to intervene in instances in which it occurs. Rackham was so interested in what neuroscience that put together for this that we learned from it. And in fact, we have our own pilot that is running this year in which four programs across the different divisions of Rackham are engaging in a similar activity in which graduate students in collaboration with faculty learn about gender harassment and how they themselves can contribute to climate within their programs. So I'd like to thank our campus colleagues who have worked on these initiatives and the posters presenting them that will be presenting across the hall. In addition, I'd also like to take this chance to thank colleagues in the Department of History, the Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering, the Graham Sustainability Institute, and the Law School whose innovations are likewise represented as part of our poster session. I encourage you to speak and learn from those individuals as part of the reception that follows. So now I would like to take a moment to highlight two current Rackham efforts within this space. The first is Rackham's longstanding interest in making internships experiences available to graduate students across campus and also to offer a variety of models that meet the needs of students and programs because the academic experience varies across the academy. So in an early phase with support from the Mellon Foundation, Rackham funded internships for professional development in the humanities and the social sciences. Rackham works with partner organizations, for example, museums, community foundations, and nonprofits to create intellectually interesting and rigorous and mutually beneficial projects where the organization value the contributions of these graduate students as they participate in during internships. Starting this year, Rackham is extending support for students doing these internships into the biological sciences. And we're also experimenting with ideas about offering them during the academic term that these opportunities can be regularly available and incorporated into the flow of the curriculum and the academic progress of students. I think we think these internships can be particularly valuable to individuals seeking a PhD in the biosciences because in those fields, there's a broad range of careers available where graduation rates outpace the growth of tenure track positions. As a second example, I'd like to mention our diversity equity inclusion certificate. We've heard from all sectors, academia, industry, nonprofits about the value of training, fluency, experience in the issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. We've created a certificate here at Rackham that responds to those national trends and those institutional needs. We've developed a co-curriculum that operates along a number of tracks in which students, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows can explore DE and I. This has been a really tremendously successful and very popular program to date 314 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from 17 schools and colleges have rolled in the program. And 108 have completed the certificates. This is a program that's just beginning of its third year. So again, this is another example, I think, in which we see that in addition to the deep disciplinary training that is offered to our students, there's this additional interest for complementary co-educational activities of a variety of kinds that augment the experience of students. I also wanna thank as well all the Rackham staff members who have worked on these and numerous other Rackham programs. You can learn about more of them as well as the poster session that will follow. So in the last few minutes, I'd like to talk a little bit about our strategic vision for graduate education. The initiatives I've touched on here illustrate the type of innovation that I think that is core to this vision. Of course, achieving a vision like this takes planning, especially in a complex, decentralized place like the University of Michigan. That vision takes planning and I wanna assure you that Rackham has a plan. I wanna share those goals with you now. These goals were developed in collaboration in the last year with more than a hundred faculty, graduate chairs and directors of graduate programs with the Rackham staff, with Rackham student government, and with alumni as well. So I really wanna thank all the individuals that have contributed to this plan that already at this point is a collaborative and collective effort. Its first goal is very much what we've talked about here today, a reimagined academic experience. In this goal, faculty are supported in their work to innovate and experiment around curriculum and the academic content of the degree. The goal addresses both masters and doctoral education. It embraces interdisciplinarity and research-based innovation in graduate education. Our second goal is strengthened diversity. In this goal, Rackham students from different backgrounds with different life experiences and different distances traveled to arrive here at the University of Michigan, all experience a sense of belonging and inclusion in their programs. Rackham's programs are increasingly diverse because of our community's intense commitment to DE and I. This goal addresses what's needed for Rackham's diverse population of students to thrive within their programs. Our third goal is enhanced partnerships and community, which all members of the Rackham community, students, faculty, staff and alumni are welcomed into this work. And our first goal is strengthened organizational culture and climate, which Rackham itself examines ways to improve its capacity to support the work of rethinking graduate education. So some of the efforts that have grown out of our planning in the last year are launching now. I'd like to take a moment just to describe those to you. The first are a set of M-Cubed Diamond projects. We held a symposium in May about research-based innovation in graduate education. As a result of that, we stood up a call for M-Cubed Diamond projects, which are fully supported by Rackham to engage in research-based innovation in graduate education. We've just funded the first four proposals within that call. This will be, the aim of this work will be to augment curriculum and academic experience from research-based ideas for both masters and doctoral students. A second project that's launching now is our Graduate Student Mental Health Task Force. This is a project that is comprised, the team is comprised of graduate faculty, graduate students and mental health professionals. It's led by Dr. Megan Duffy from Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. And its goal is for this team to develop actionable ideas that can be used to support graduate students in their mental health and their academic progress as they undergo their degrees. Our third initiative that is launching now is a review of the Rackham Merit Fellowship Program. And if you will be aware of the RMF program, it is our most, as in our premier recruiting fellowship, it has materially affected the diversity of the Rackham student population. It's been a program that has been successful for 20 years. We think it's an opportune time now to review this program and align its goals with our current efforts and interests and needs in DNI. So it stood up now for success for the next 20 years. So as a final piece, I just wanna take a moment to ask something of you. So just by being here today, you've demonstrated your interest and your curiosity about reimagining graduate education and your possibly and hopefully your appreciation of its importance. We wanna give the whole Rackham community, students, staff, alumni, and faculty, a number of different opportunities to engage on this as we move forward. For this work to succeed, we really need your ideas. We need your commitment. We need you to be talking with your colleagues about what is possible, what might be done. We need you and we need people to be champions within programs to help make this a reality. For the faculty in the audience, I would like to speak to you directly for just a moment. I'll be hosting monthly coffee hours during which we can talk about ideas that are related to this vision. I would also like to ask faculty to gear up with their ideas to support some calls for initiatives that we'll be launching a little bit later in the year associated with events that I'll also talk about in just a moment. And as a last piece, our Rackham associate deans and myself were available to join you at a faculty meeting if you'd like to talk about some of these broader issues with your colleagues. So as a final ask, if you'd like a request, I wanna invite you to participate in a national symposium we'll be hosting on Rethinking Graduate Education on February 7th. We'll be bringing together national leaders to help us have both a cross-disciplinary and an interdisciplinary conversation to catalyze new ideas. And Rackham is ready and prepared to invest in those ideas that are generated as a result of those symposium. So today, I hope that I've given you an overview of some of the ways that we can rethink graduate education for the 21st century. I hope in presenting these ideas and initiatives to you is to draw your attention to the exciting ways that graduate training is already changing on our campus and to offer examples that you might learn from as you think about what might make sense within your disciplines and fields going forward. I just wanna conclude by stressing that this vision I think requires all of us to come together as a group. It requires graduate faculty, graduate students, graduate staff and alumni all to come together to really kind of embrace and work together on this vision around student-centered graduate education. University of Michigan really is the unique place, just a well-positioned place to engage this work. And Rackham is poised and ready to help you as you embrace this work going forward. So with that, I wanna thank you and then we'll have time for questions and discussion. Thank you very much. So I'm not 100% sure how we're doing this but I think there are microphones and there are people with questions and so we will be doing, okay, we have a way to, so if you can signal, indicate in some way if you'd like to ask a question and then we'll get going from there. Have one right there. Please go ahead, Julie. And then we have Nils here and Mark as well. Julie, please go ahead. As you know, I'm excited about a great deal of this, all of it actually. I would say that two themes, through lines, priorities I think could need to be lifted up and in concrete ways and that is there are scores, hundreds of national leaders around these questions who are graduate students, recent graduate students, early career people who are publishing on these issues collaboratively in books and articles. They are writing about, for example, having, thinking about the hybridity of their professional aspirations and trying to figure out what a position is like and they're telling us what that feels like and they are, they're program builders where they are and I think that nothing about us without us might very well apply under that category of national leaders and in Canada as well, there are some very important people who are in conversation across the border so and one could ripples beyond that but so I think that's important. I also think opening up explicitly the question of faculty learning, faculty learning yes from and with graduate students but just faculty learning about experiments elsewhere with what we're doing, so coffee hours are great but really explicitly talking about how diversity allies operates, does it operate as a level of departmental changes of various or does it work as a feedback loop to RACM and how does that work? I mean, I think that faculty learning is as important as graduate student learning. I think, let me and those are both and to speak briefly about them in the reverse order, when you think about what this building was built for, RACMs, they wanted this to be a center of interdisciplinary exchange and an event like this, the event we had in May, these are examples of this. So this idea about faculty learning, for us that means getting together and talking across disciplines. There's so much I think to be learned in these ways and we're RACM is available to kind of catalyze and coordinate these kinds of activities and the other piece about engaging our own alumni I think is really right on point. I just had the opportunity to attend an event in Detroit last year called RACM Impact in Detroit which we heard from recent alumni and our own graduate students about the work in Detroit that they're doing that really engages in the sphere of public scholarship and public engagement and just to kind of connect the two together, I learned so much about what those students are doing and that's just one example of the wonderful work that our students are doing that we can learn from. Thank you, George. Nils. Yeah, maybe this is a great segue into the question I had. So I think RACM is really pioneering this and this is an important role to play nationwide but coming from a different educational system myself I also see this challenge of there not being the same societal pact between higher education and society at large in terms of understanding what role society really plays I mean higher education really plays in bringing us the drugs and technologies of the future and that's something that is not easy to convey to the public. RACM's role of course is mostly inward looking and the program is mostly inward looking which makes a lot of sense because that's the role that RACM has but I'm just wondering whether there are other ways in kind of engaging the broader public beyond Michigan in some way. I mean you do that maybe with this conference already and things like this but are there other ways in which RACM can kind of go to Washington and do something, right? Or I mean or to Lansing and engage broader swath. So this is a wonderful question for everybody in higher education at the current moment and it's really one of the pressures I think that I identified. One thing I would say is that I've thought that so it's an important thing to think about and one of the ways that I've thought about this is that our best advocates are our students and one of the ways that I've seen this happen is through SAGE which is an organization of students that really take this on to go so the G is for graduate so they themselves go to Lansing, they go to Washington and they talk about the work that they're doing and I think what the connection is, I think the thing that the public doesn't always understand is how these research discoveries that affect their lives are actually happening, okay? They are happening through the work that we do as graduate educators and those discoveries are across, those are not just scientific discoveries, they're discoveries about how people interact and about the human condition and so I think there is a piece of work to be done there and in some sense I think through this innovation that we're engaging in here that will give us the way to talk about this in a way that is one step in that path. Thanks, Ness. Mark? So just talking about the inward facing and thinking about a lot of research now as interdisciplinary and that's I think great for the students, it's great for the faculty and the one thing I'd like you to comment on or that I worry about is how do you generate or how do you take the knowledge that's generated in those experiences and sort of funnel that back to the curriculum and I think that the structure that we live in could arguably hinder that and whether you see the future as more certificate programs or what are your thoughts on that? So I think the question is a wonderful one and when I'm out talking about needs trying to learn from faculty and students about where the needs are I often hear the words barriers to interdisciplinary so the word barrier often comes up within this context and so there is this interdisciplinary work of course at its root relies on strong disciplines and then there's the idea that as I under my model of this is that disciplines regenerate and grow through these kinds of exchanges and so I think we're perhaps in some ways we're a little bit at the start in this in that there are I think one can identify barriers to interdisciplinary and I wouldn't wanna kind of precondition what those barriers actually are. You can see if you look at what the data show there's been a tremendous growth and interest in certificate programs and so that is certainly one way and one that we've seek to support both in as many ways as that we can but I do I would ask this community the question is that the only way that interdisciplinary can occur? I wanna go back to my own example just for a moment. If I had some boot camp that I could have gone to to get that thing that was that experience with the faculty that I couldn't find as a student that might have put me on a different path. So what would it look like to have if a complimentary skill would energize a student's research and actually help the discipline itself what would it look like for that actually to happen? Is there, there's a microphone up here and then we'll come back to you. There you are. One of the things that in my department we don't have a very good ability to address is when students come up to us and say well we're thinking of leaving the field what are the opportunities and can you help us get into that? We're very good at directing them to the field and people we know but when they want to move into industry and other things it's a real challenge for us and I imagine other departments as well that seems like one of the centralized things that Rackham might be able to approach. Yes, I think it's a thanks for asking that question because I think this is a this is something that I think is a common across many many disciplines is how do you actually make that jump? You want to help your students but how do you get them the information? So what we've learned in our conversation with programs through program review in fact that there are a number of ways to kind of catalyze this kind of jump to support students into other careers. Internships often are one of them and often the other piece is inviting your own alumni back like finding because we're so good about knowing where our alumni are within Rackham through your work we often can identify alumni and then some programs will invite them back actually to kind of so you can actually directly ask those questions. What I think is most strong is when those alumni when they come back they don't just talk to students, right? So students want to hear from those alumni about what happened but what really is a value is when those alumni come back and they talk to faculty, right? Faculty like I would use myself as an example I in an earlier period did not really know how to help students find industry careers but when my students that got those jobs came back and talked to me I asked them about what it was about their experience that helped them and then over time I've gained some fluency with that. So that may not be the only, I don't want to say that that's the only answer but I would say that Rackham is can do what you said which is have this set of resources available and what works for me may not work for you in astronomy and they may not work for you in compilates, et cetera and that's something that we can definitely address. Does that answer your question or do you want to ask a follow up? Former grads come in there's a life after graduate school but they really need to be able to go to a professional person who will tell them what companies are looking for and not looking for and who really understand that in some depth that a depth that even though I try, I don't understand. So it would be better to have some central facility or... Yep, understood and that's really helpful. So one thing I'm just going to give a shout out to Laura Schramm at Rackham and our PhD career connections conference which sounds more like what you're saying where we have a campus event where students can come explore their interest and then we have thematic sessions that are held based on different kinds of career tracks and then students can explore the connections of those. So that's another way to do that as well. And maybe there's things that we still need to learn and develop. Yes, thank you. PhD student in health behavior, health education. So I appreciate the need to reimagine the academy. I am sitting with attention to something that you said a little bit earlier where you said graduate education should be student centered and at the same time that the changes need to be faculty led. And I can't help but sit and wonder why we would exclude students from leading efforts to change our own education and put this on faculty which I respect their expertise and also recognizing that they've also been trained at a time that might be 40, 50 years before we're here today. And so no offense, but it's also the truth. So we have to sit with the fact that some of the things we're learning are old like to be completely frank. And so how do we, as an academy and those who are training up the next researchers and leaders in our fields, get to insert our needs into what curricula and teaching looks like? But I appreciate the comment and I think you are getting at, like I would like to try to hold our view, the collective view that we've come into years that we're trying to hold these two ideas together at once, that students are contributing to this effort, that the ways that you describe are engaged. And at the same time, the faculty who are collaborating with the students on the research and scholarship are also engaged in this process in a way that has a leadership role given the way in which they create, they have the role of creating curriculum on campus. So I really do appreciate your point and I think you're getting at the fundamental idea of student-centered and this idea, and I would say, the way you've spoken about this, these are conversations we've had at great length within RACM. How do these two ideas fit together? I do believe that they fit together. That we want faculty to be engaged in this work in a deep level because that is their role. And at the same time, we want students, I mean, this would really go to Julie's point, is we want students who themselves have expertise in this area, often through their own scholarship, to be able to contribute as well. And that is some of the work to be frank that we need to do and probably needs to be done within programs. Thank you. Let's see, is there, I think we have got mics going, Ron, you can, and then we have, yes. Yes, hi. So you made a brief mention in your talk about the way faculty are stretched. And I'm curious if you have any thoughts about how to shift some of that stretch so that more faculty can be more deeply engaged in really working on these issues. So I mean, I think many of us are deeply committed to the things that you have outlined, but we're stretched. And, you know, I mean, there are similar pressures coming from the undergraduate curriculum, from faculty governance. And I'm just curious, I haven't seen very many models that explore the ways in which we could shift what faculty workloads look like to accommodate some of this. And I'm just curious if you have thought about that and what that might look like from your perspective. So I don't, I won't be able to give you an answer. So I would say, I've thought about it, I would say that I've, maybe I would just replace the word thought with worried about it. And if I were to look forward three years from now, three, four years from now, and wonder, like, what was the central tension that we were trying to work with here? I would put that as two or three things on the list. And I think it's, you said it very well, it's faculty want to do this work and how can we create a space to do that? And that's really at its root, why when you had that tagline there, that's why Rackham's supported this there. So, you know, we have a goal looking around how can we actually do this? We would like, we will not be able to completely solve this problem, but I think where we are at the stage is identifying this, is that this is one of the constraints. This is the one of the things we need to address to get this, for this to move forward. And so I can't give you a full answer than that, but I accept to say that I think there is, it is progress already to kind of call that out and say that we need to be thinking about it as part of this work. Let's see, there's a hand here and there's been a hand here. And then you have the microphone. Yes, hi. So I want to change the conversation a little bit because there's been tremendous pressure to start offering courses over the internet and graduate education over the internet. And I have been struck by the fact that our remedies here are the ones that I support, which is more person-to-person communication, more time with students, more outreach, networking and so forth, which the internet is not really an optimum venue for it. In fact, when I look at graduate education through mass dissemination, the things that I think are essential to graduate education, an opportunity to wrestle with information with other individuals and have discussed them deeply and argue over them is lost. And so, yet there is economic incentive, strong economic incentives for the academia to offer these programs. So how are we wrestling with that in Rackham? So you identified, so I'll tell you a little bit about Rackham just for a second, which is that we have an elected executive board, it's 12 kind faculty members who serve basically as your representatives as graduate faculty. One of the things I'll be asking them to do this year is to have constantly themselves as a learning community to really dive into this question. So we can see, and it's not just nationally, I'm not sure if you're aware, but for those of you in some of the professional schools, there are online programs that are being stood up here at the moment at the University of Michigan. I think the question for us as research people that kind of specialize or are thinking about research-based education is, what are the things that we can take from those models? The experiment, you know, whenever we talk about, we talk about experience, we talk about a close relationship with faculty and students, but are there pieces, I imagine it would always be some kind of hybrid approach, but are there pieces where there would be value? I do go back sometimes to this times where there's a particular skill that a student might want to value that might be useful to gain outside of a course context, and perhaps there's an opportunity there, but I do think that this tension is one reason why you perceive not too much movement in this space into this area, but at the same time, if there is an opportunity there, I would like us to be able to identify it, and it's one reason why, like in the goals of this plan, we have this idea to talk about modes of delivery, and then at the same time acknowledging that this deep kind of experiential component is deeply intrinsic to what we did. It's a great point. Okay, in the back, I don't know if you guys can put your hands on a microphone. There's some people here that are interested in the microphone. Oh, you have one, good, okay. Please go ahead, thank you. So I wanted to bring the conversation back to the interdisciplinary aspect, and so one thing you talked about here is interdisciplinary exchange between different departments, right? You talked about going to another lab to learn another technique, or discussing amongst other departments. But when we talk about interdisciplinary exchange, we still kind of remain in this sort of traditional, narrow scope, like I am in my discipline, and maybe I learn a little bit from another discipline, but I'm still anchored in this one discipline. And so considering that, I wonder, do you have any plans going forward considering the idea of more interdisciplinary learning? A kind of program or anything like that, where students learn between different disciplines. They're not anchored in one traditional literature or Asian studies or whatever. They're kind of not really anchored specifically in any one spot, and learning from a multitude of disciplines to create a sort of comprehensive kind of degree certificate. And I was just wondering what you think about this kind of thing, the limitations of exchange versus learning. This is a very interesting point, and one where I think the understanding of this, varies a lot by where we are within the graduate school. So I would mention that there's a couple of programs that I could think of that are maybe a little bit more on the STEM side, where they are interdisciplinary in the sense that those fields actually in an earlier phase did not exist, and they became graduate programs that in some sense are not actually linked to an undergraduate degree. I'm thinking of programs like Applied Physics or the Macro, Macro, Science, and Engineering program, where if you look at the curriculum in those programs, they actually draw, to use macro as an example, they draw from chemistry, they draw from engineering, they draw from physics. And so these programs were stood up, and they can be stood up, and there have been programs that have been stood up even within the last five years that are really designed to kind of capitalize on kind of some intersection of a set of fields that are kind of proximate to each other and then create something truly new that goes forward. And so I mentioned that just to say that that canon does happen. And what I do find a little bit interesting is that the extent to which we see that does vary a little bit by fields. And so that's an example, I think, where cross-disciplinary, like where we're humanists and physical scientists, there are things that we all can learn from each other just by talking in this kind of educative way about what it is that we're actually doing. So I think you've raised a great point. I am a PhD student, and you're talking about rethinking graduate education. I worked in industry for a number of years before I came back to graduate school, and I see there's a lot of things I learned in industry that are kind of, nobody in the academic environment even knows that those things are out there. And I've heard several comments already, including your own story, about faculty having a hard time understanding what's going on in industry. Well, I know there are engineering programs where part of getting a bachelor's degree or maybe even a graduate degree of some sort is to spend time in industry. Why couldn't something like that apply to faculty as well? Suppose, and this is a wild idea, but suppose something that was either encouraged or maybe even required to obtain tenure or maybe even to maintain tenure was to spend a certain amount, maybe one or two years out of every decade in some other environment, in industry or some environment outside of academia where there could be some, both the faculty member could contribute to that, whatever that environment is, and then bring back into the academy new experience that they wouldn't have gotten any other way. I did think that rethinking graduate education was going to be kind of tough, but I think you kind of touched on everything in there. I'm not sure I can actually really, I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to pick that one up, but your broad point is appreciated about, there's, when we think about internships, right? There's this interest in students kind of connecting into different fields, and what would it look like for faculty to have the ability to do that as well? So I would kind of scale back, and I think there, and again, I think that varies across discipline, how prevalent those interactions are and how you go about seeing, how about you go about actually receiving them. I'm not gonna go with the tenure and things like that, that's for somebody else, but I thank you for your question. I think we're, I just wanna do a time, yes. So I'm gonna take a last question. I'm happy to, and it's gonna be up there with the gentleman with the microphone, and then I'll be happy to, I'll be at the poster position as well, and please, we'll be able to continue this, because I do wanna give, we have colleagues that are gonna be having posters, and so we'll take that question, and then I'll close out. Please go ahead. Thank you. Two quick things. One, in response to your interdisciplinaryness, a specific thing I would recommend looking at is SIDP, the Student Initiated Degree Program, which if you don't know allows two PhD programs to be combined, and I guess two aspects. One is a student can only do it once they arrive, so you cannot use it as a recruitment tool, you can mention it, but that raises a challenge, and also there are funding and other bureaucratic issues we hit when you're negotiating with other programs, and if there's ways that RACM could facilitate that or help us, that would be great. I guess the bigger challenge I see in graduate education coming from a public serving, public-minded professional school is we are at a public institution with quasi-private tuition, which our graduate students feel. We are training students to serve the public interest and believe in the public good, but they are entering a labor force and a political economy where increasingly the rhetoric about the university is moving away from public goods and education as a private good. Now, those tensions between public and private can be exciting, but I think those tensions are getting to a breaking point, at least in a smaller fields like urban planning, et cetera, and at some point, something's gonna break. That is a great way to round out this session. That was it. I mean, you've identified, like you've kind of taken some of the pressures that I talked about and kind of like extrapolated them, I think, five or 10 years out. And I think this conflict, how you kind of have put together public and private good is a really interesting thing that I think we do well to keep in mind. And I think I would then come back to when you look at the University of Michigan's mission, when you look at Rackham's mission, we've got public good right there. And I think it's why we all made choices as to where we are, but I'm at the University of Michigan because of that piece with the public good and how to reconcile that with the broader public interest is something that we have to do. I just want to compliment you in knowing about a student-initiated degree program. That's the, just so you all know about that, that's, there's about 100 students or so that, you know, on a five-year scale are doing PhDs that are really collaborations between two departments where the student initiates a degree program. So it's a jewel of that. We have the University of Michigan. This really results because of this kind of common structure that we have at the Rackham Graduate School. The PhD research-based masters are common degrees across the University of Michigan and they have common goals, common principles, and that's really why that it's essence to have a graduate school. So with that, I really want to thank you for, this has been a wonderful conversation. I understand that we're gonna be able to open up the doors, so don't go out there right away so you can go out onto the veranda and look out. Please do spend some time with the posters, but it's a wonderful day out. So please enjoy yourselves and continue your additional conversation. And thank you so much. Thank you.