 All right. I hope everyone can hear us online as well as in person. I'm Terry Green. I serve on the U.S. ETGA Board. And it is my pleasure today to introduce our breakout speaker, Valerie Burke. And Valerie is from the University of Nevada Las Vegas Graduate School. And she will be taking questions closer to the end of her presentation. So feel free to put them in the chat. And if anyone is here in person who wants to, you know, ask questions that can just come right up to the mic. And so with that, I will leave it to Valerie to share with us. Did you hear that? That's graduate students sharing their research. Take it away, Val. Thank you. Hello, everybody. I am on West Coast time. So it is about 1.13 here. And I don't know if it's a theme at most universities right now, but we are super short staff. So that's why I'm in a tie to my shirt today. I had to table an event. We were hosting a Hispanic Heritage Month celebration. And I did not have enough time to switch back in. Oh my gosh, it's 90 degrees here. So it is very hot. But I'm in the air condition now and I'm very excited to present to you today. I'm the assistant dean for the Graduate Student Services here at UNLV. And I've been with the Graduate College for about eight years now. We also housed the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs. So I oversee that. UNLV is an R1 high research activity institution. We were established in 1957. So it's a very young university. We have about 30,000 students of those 30,000, 5,000 are graduate students. We also hold the designations of an HSI, MSI and an APZ. If you want to talk about that later, usually a lot of questions come from that and having all three is a big deal. And hence why we have events like today. And then we also are tied for first for the most diverse university in the country. So we have a lot going on. One of the things that is in my Graduate Student Services office is our thesis and dissertation office. I have two part-time employees who help me. And basically I'll do a little overview because we get their research, right? So we have very strict deadlines on what thesis and dissertations are due. Their formatting is to the T. We have a checklist of all the formatting that has to be done before it's uploaded to ProQuest. So my team handles all of that. And I'm on my second slide. Can you guys see that? It says the Grad Academy. No, we're still seeing your first slide, Val. I don't know. Let me try to share the whole screen and see what happened. She started. Yes, she started. Okay, let me try. Now can you see the second slide? We're seeing the Grad Academy. Okay, so when I first got here in this position about eight years ago, I was the first executive director. And what I created was the Grad Academy. The Grad Academy is a central hub for evidence-based graduate student professional and career development programming, non-academic advising. This unit we host over 60 workshops a year in collaboration with a lot of our campus partners, of course. We host 11 signature events. We do the online academic advising, career support. In addition, we also offer four co-curricular certifications, and we have 10 programs. It is a lot. And all of these are free professional and career development opportunities for my grad and my professional students. And we also built this Grad Academy around six pillars, including personal professional career development and then you'll see here our motto, innovative leadership, professional and career development. So that's the big hub that the Grad Academy encompasses. And then within, I mentioned those 11 signature events, the very first one I ever did was I created the Rebel Grad Slam. So you might have heard about the 3MT thesis competition. It came out of the University of Queensland and it has now branched into over 100 different universities across the country. So we adopted their template and their styles of how to run the 3MT thesis competition. So this basically tells you what it is. The idea is to explain for the graduate student who they are, what they study, why they study it and what their research questions are and then how they're going to analyze it. And then of course we want to know why does it matter to folks outside your field. Everyone gets one PowerPoint slide and it's a template. They can't change the colors, they can't put animation, they can't dress up and so it's very standard and then everyone has less than three minutes. So we'll have people at two minutes and 59 seconds and they're fine. As soon as you hit that three minutes, it goes red. I would say though we've only had maybe like a handful of students who have gone over the three minutes. So it's definitely not something we worry about. In the event too we actually display a clock that does the countdown so they can see the clock and so can the judges. So why do we host this? So the Rebel Grad Slam 3 Minute Thesis Competition is an opportunity for our graduate and professional students to showcase their research and scholarship in an engaging way. Its fast-paced research rumble is what we've tag-lined it to highlight the innovative and impactful work being done by Rebel Graduates students. So they're coached too. We host a workshop a few months before the actual event that shows them this is what the PowerPoint template will look like. This is what you can expect. We have a panel of previous winners who kind of give their tips and tricks, their best practices and then we have some of previous judges also there giving their pointers. If you go to our website which you'll see at the end, I have a slide that gives you the website for this. You'll see that we have YouTube videos where we interview our top winners from the past and they share their experience with it. See here. So obviously you can tell like the big deal is we want them to share their thesis and dissertation research but honestly they can share any research they want. If they're in their first year, their last year or whatever program they're in, they're all everyone's invited to join. But it is a lot. So this is kind of our, this was our call last year. So if you want to register to participate, you had to fill out this form that said, you know, your name where you are in your program, the title of your presentation. And then we give them a specific deadline of when they have to submit that PowerPoint that we require. So we can pre-check it that they met all the parameters if they need to change anything like they went outside the line or changed the color we'll send it back to them or if they put any pictures that aren't annotated. So things like that we'll let them now. And then like I said, you can visit our Rebel Grassland website, check out all our resources here for past winners. So our goal is for everyone to be as much prepared and have all the resources at their fingertips so that when they get to their presentation, they're very comfortable. Because one of the big things is they have to remember to figure out when to use jargon and when to use layman's terms because their audience is going to be people not necessarily, you know, with the same background as them in the same department. We set up, let me show you the next slide. Oh, first I'll talk about judges. So we put out a call for judges through you and all the faculty, our staff, alumni and community members. They're all invited to judge. And then they're going to receive training prior to the session so that everyone's on the same playing field. Everyone knows exactly what's expected of them ahead of time. Also at the training, and the training is we just ask them to come like 15 minutes before their session just to review. But they're going to be scoring on comprehension, content, engagement, and communication. And then you'll see on the next slide we have a preliminary round. We have a semi-finals in the finals. For the finals, we rent out a huge auditorium. And we do pick those judges to be like the you and I'll be president, the provost. Sometimes we've had elected officials. We've had all-star alumni. So things like that. So those ones are hand-picked. Okay, just so you can kind of get a flow of how all this works. Our preliminary rounds, each student only participates in one round. So when they're filling out that original entry to participate and register for the event, we're going to ask them what is your preferred time slot on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. And then you can see we do a noon. And then we do a five o'clock. So working with different schedules. So hopefully we can accommodate everybody. You can see this one was via WebEx because during COVID we didn't want to slow down. Somehow we turned all this virtual. And it did go really, really smooth. But there was a lot that went on behind the scenes. And then last year we did hybrid. And then this year we're going to, I think, be back in person. So just to give you all an idea. Semi-finals. So of all of these sessions you see here, there's two Monday, Tuesdays, and two Wednesdays. Everyone is randomly selected and do different slots. So it's not all STEM together or all liberal arts together, or anything like that. Everyone is mixed into different categories randomly. And then same with the judges. The judges don't have to have a background in whatever the presenters were studying because everyone's supposed to be talking as if nobody knows your background. That's kind of one of the fun parts about it. So you'll see under each one of these is going to have a winner. So on Monday, we'll all be in person at noon and probably have three rooms. And each room would have about seven participants in each one. And then we'd put a first, second, and third place from each one of those. You'll see here who advances then to the semi-finals. So again, each student will only participate in one round. This we do in a mini theater. So the first rounds are like a classroom setting or one of our conference rooms. In a mini theater for the semi-finals. And there's three rounds. You have three different times and students can pick which time that fits their schedule best. We'll have a first choice and a second choice. We can almost always accommodate that. And then our big winners from semi-finals go on to the final rounds. And we host that in our theater in the Student Union one year. One year we also hosted it in the theater over in our STEM building. So we kind of move because we have a lot of beautiful spaces. We want to make sure students know about. A lot of people will come to these events and say this is the first time I ever knew this space was here. It's the first time I've been in here. So it kind of helps with those things too. So in the finals they're on stage. There's a big screen with their PowerPoint. The timer is also amplified onto the wall screen. And then I'll go over the prizes in the next round. But we get these big huge checks kind of like you see on game shows and we give those. One thing we added I'd say maybe three years ago was audience choice. So each round also has like a ballot and anybody who's in the audience will check who their favorite was from that session. And then that person will also win some scholarship money. So you can see in the middle picture there we host a reception after the finals. So we have a pretty full heavy appetizer, hot and cold catered event and we have a bar a cash bar and then we invite faculty, staff, community members, the judges the participants. One of the big things we ask is for the participants to invite their family and friends and bring them on campus and everybody's invited to join this. We also hire a professional photographer which really helps catch all these moments and then we also hire the videographer because we have a YouTube channel and I can share that too but if you go to the graduate college YouTube and we have a channel just from all of the presentations from the finals and then you'll see different channels that are all our professional developments that we filmed we have another event called student showcase and we filmed those. So everybody is hearing all of our graduate students that participate all the research that they're working on and then what we notice too is a lot of during the mix and mingle faculty or family members will come up and say introduce themselves. I'm so intrigued by your research and really it's a great networking event as well. Ok prizes. So we have in the preliminary rounds, remember I said each cohort competes each room is going to have a first, second, and a third place and they move on to the semifinals and you can see that the each first place will get 200, second, 150, and third 100 and then the audience choice I believe is $100 we get there. For semifinal rounds we have those three rounds and each round is going to have a first, second, and third first place, 200, second place 150, third place $100 and then final is our third place gets $500 second place wins $750 and first place wins $1000 now this is all scholarship money that's been ear tagged through that funding source in the grad college because y'all there's a lot that goes on I guess in the back end how different money can be allocated so that money is from specifically for scholarship money and so some people right if you get all the way to the finals that means you made you want a scholarship from the first round the second round and the third round if you place in all three of them so that adds up really nicely and the money goes into their student account so if they owe any money or they want to use the money to pay for next semester the money will be there or they can have it a direct deposited into the bank account and use it however they wish so everybody is getting prizes too so even if you don't place every participant is getting a Rebel grad slam t-shirt and a gift bag all of our judges get the same a t-shirt and a gift bag sometimes a gift bag will be something different like one year we gave the judges calculators but they were like book calculators that also had post-its in it we'll give out mugs, travel mugs but everyone loves so you can see we're really big on our t-shirts I'm wearing the one from the event today so it's kind of one of those highlights everybody looks forward to and we try to change up the design and the color of the shirt in case some people are participating year after year and same for the judges we have some judges who have been with me since the very beginning when we created the event so the other prizes the college with the most grad Rebel participants they get a free lunch so we look and we see at the college how many students participated and we just put together a nice little it's mostly pizza and dessert and stuff like that but it always has a great turnout and we don't just invite the students that participated the whole college is invited so we put out an email to all the grad students in that college because it's a good way to plug the event because maybe they weren't ready to participate this year but they want to participate next year so now they're like oh okay I see what this is I want to get involved now and then the overall first place the college is awarded the Rebel gradsland trophy and they get to keep it and display it for the academic year so most of them keep it right in their dean's office or a high traffic area and then the first place winner will participate in the western association of graduate schools WAGs for short 3MT competition my boss at the time was on the WAGs board and said all of us are doing all these different great competitions at our schools why don't we bring the winners from all of our schools to our annual western association of grad schools conference and host the 3MT there so we now do that it's the exact same format with the PowerPoint with the you get three minutes and then everyone donates the scholarship money so that we have the top three winners getting some scholarship money and then all schools have agreed too to part to fund the travel for our participants everyone just brings one winner and we pay for the travel per dean no cost to the student whatsoever and then of course they could win more scholarship money so that is Rebel gradslam and I should say the Rebel comes from because that's our mascot we're the UNLD rebels so we play off of that word in case anybody was wondering where the Rebel came from okay so that was one way that we showcase highlight get students to talk about their research network and then this is the second way I mean we definitely have more than two but these are our two biggest events for students to share their research is Rebel gradslam and then the GPSA annual student research forum and this is a long tradition at UNLD for something to be at UNLD for 25 years straight with being such a young institution like this is huge I can't over express that so in 2023 next year we'll host the 25th one and this is mostly run by our graduate and professional student association which is essentially our student government for grad students and then we co-host co-sponsor the grad college with them so Rebel gradslam is always in the fall and Rebel gradslam is always in the spring and this spring event showcases the excellence in research conducted at the graduate student level and more than 160 students participate each year and from over 40 disciplines so I should have mentioned earlier too we have over now we have over 175 programs Masters, PhDs and so that we want and we get a great representation from across the board interdisciplinary for something like this so the annual student research forum is very conference style format so students either present their work through a poster like you can see in the photo or they're going to do a podium presentation kind of like what I'm doing right now and we have a photographer for this event so you can see these people in action the 10 minute podium presentation usually includes a slide deck they can use PowerPoint I know there's a lot of new ones totally up to them we don't force them to use any specific program but we do encourage the use of some sort of visual and then if somebody is choosing the poster presentation it's a five minute presentation in front of their poster like you see here in the photo and then both the podium and the poster sessions are evaluated by faculty judges and same thing they have a rubric and it is super strict easy to follow and you can also see both the rubrics for this judging event and for Rebel Grads name on our websites because we want students to see them we want them to know what they're being judged on so they can appropriately prepare okay so a lot of the prizes for this event I know the grad college help sponsor them and then we also help with the event so once everybody is done with their presentations and everything is tallying and scoring is going on there's a beautiful catered lunch usually the dean will do a welcome the provost usually comes and at the end of all of the speeches and welcomes and the bottom right you can see our current GPSA president she also does a welcome session winners are granted monetary awards to support their advance to advance their research the podium session winners it's like Rebel Grads name where there's different sessions and there's a winner from each session first place in each room gets a $500 scholarship and the second place in each podium room gets a $350 scholarship and then for the poster session same thing everybody's broken down into a time slot and for each time slot there's a first place winner for $400 and a second place winner for $250 and the scholarships work the same way that I mentioned earlier they go into their account and either it can be direct positive end to their bank account or it can be used to fund anything that they want to at UNLV their choice okay so our student government GPSA has a lot of funding opportunities for our graduate students that we are so thankful for and usually what we do since they have the committee set up their representatives from all the different colleges on campus all the different programs on campus we have an annual day of giving and we host competitions in the grad college so for students that um so anybody that donates that day they can donate to the research fund they can donate to our grad academy they can donate discretionary funds things like that so we always say that if the research award category hits $10,000 we're going to unlock $10,000 and give it to this committee that gives away the research money to the students so in addition GPSA has over $175,000 budgeted to support graduate and professional students annually so throughout the year the GPSA awards research and travel grants to students to support projects directly affect their degree program and make a contribution to their discipline in 2021 to 2022 like I said $175,000 was budgeted to support graduate and professional student research and conference travel the other scholarship fund the annual research forum is the opportunity for students to share their GPSA sponsored work with the UNLV community the forum like I mentioned is open to all graduate and professional students wishing to share their research practice their presentation skills or obtain constructive comments um on their work from faculty so um in both events they can request to have the judge um comments so we ask the judges like they don't have to put their name on it but to put the student's name on it and the students can see what they scored well in what they didn't score well in and then some comments that might be written in their side it's not required that they write comments but we encourage it because anything we can do to help the student get better of course is the goal and it's important to know that participation in the annual research forum is a requirement for students who received GPSA funding during the 2021-22 act of the year so every year if students are applying and getting research money out of that $175,000 budget they um it's a required that they participate in this forum so what's great is they have an amazing online application process that you could Google if you wanted to check it out um but basically it asks them what what are you requesting the money for what are you going to be used to if you're traveling to a conference are you attending are you presenting um and then they ask for you know um projected uh flights costs registration fees hotels per diem any like taxis things like that um and so they have students pointing together this whole budget which one is a great experience for them for whatever they're going to do next in their career but also what then the um representatives all the students come together that are in this committee and they review all these applications and either fully fund partially fund or deny and ask for more information um or deny and say try for the next cycle just depending on what the situation is um so that is one of the biggest ways that my grad students and um also for professional development so somebody says I need the certificate for my hotel degree and it would be great if I could do it in China they would put together that whole proposal that's required what they're but what they're requesting um and and they can ask um each year for um funding so you'd have to apply separately but separately each year so it's not like a one time and that's it um each year the students can go in and and reapply so I know I talked a lot and I talk really fast but um hopefully that all came together to show you um two of the most important ways that we encourage students to get out there and share their research um if you want more information these are the websites that I discussed and of course you can just email me or call me directly um and I'd love to chat with anybody I've uh had um I want to say I presented at the council of graduate schools on just um our professional development academy and rebel grad slam and um I get a lot of questions a lot of people want to meet with me after because they want to bring that to their school and you don't have to start from scratch um you know we have the templates we have the rules they're you know what I mean like nobody has to reinvent the wheel you can kind of take what we've already created and put your own spin on it if you wanted to um or a lot of people ask me about budgeting like where does the money come from so if you guys have any of those questions I can answer them now or um let me see here so anyone from the room wants to uh ask a question please come up to the mic and uh any virtual participants please put a question in the chat can you guys see that big picture yes okay so I just want to let you know we got to um we built a brand new graduate college about in 2019 we opened in 2019 um I would just say I'll work I'm just in one of those roles where you build it you build it and it just you put in the sometimes you don't have all the staff and you don't have all the money that you need but we start from somewhere we start at the foundation and build it we build it and now I mean but we're that whole second floor um above cookie crumble Roberto's Pete's coffee um that's the grad college floor um and we have a um graduate school in there where students can come in and it's computer lab and it's only for graduate and professional students um but I just I just want everyone to know like we literally started with nothing and we've come a very long way in eight years and trying to see how I stopped sharing so you can I can see you guys okay there we go that's wonderful Valerie that's just that looks like a really beautiful sight and uh you really really accomplished a lot you're right and now when you see the opposite post stock affairs that might make sense because now they want me to do that same thing with the opposite postdoc fairs there was not one on campus um and then they said oh let's give it to Valerie in the grad college and I have no budget I have um literally just starting it from the foundation and hope to build it to be as big as the grad academy sorry um so like how many postdocs do you have great question um we saw a dip um after during COVID um so I'd say right now we're at about 42 we need to be at like 142 okay cool I need to talk to you because I'm in the same position I have like 30 something postdocs and I work in the graduate school and there's no budget and what school are you at um UNC Charlotte oh my gosh let's let's definitely talk because I can show you how far we've already come I have a top tier um advisory board with faculty members I've created three budget proposals um I've created an award um that just got approved in March and right now we just just got approved we got funding from the provost office to have a doctoral to postdoc program so my docs right who are doing all this crazy research and they're like I don't want to graduate I want to finish my research and the faculty are like don't graduate I want you to finish with me well now they can apply for this program so they graduate which helps my graduation numbers and now they're starting this postdoc position guaranteed job with the salary and so yeah let's definitely talk oh my gosh that's more exciting stuff in the past five seconds than I've heard all week back just make sure when you email me you type my name right because it will auto correct oh gotcha that's amazing Valerie any other I want you to come to our university and do this after us and it was really hard because I'm just staring at like a power point screen I wish I could like see faces and do all that stuff um but maybe hopefully next time well it doesn't look like we have any more questions we want to thank Valerie Burke from the University of Nevada Las Vegas for her wonderful presentation and I think a lot of us will be in touch with you thank you so much I hope so