 Good afternoon all. I am Mike Solomon, the Rackham Dean. I'd like to thank you all for participating in today's event, which is going to focus on some key issues and opportunities facing us as a Rackham community in this moment. After some brief remarks by me, my colleague Rita Chin, Professor of History and Rackham Associate Dean, will moderate a panel of Rackham community members. These faculty and students have engaged with us over the course of the past year on exploring ideas to transform the graduate student experience within beyond their programs in substantive and novel ways. We'll have some time for questions and discussion during the latter part of the event, which I'm looking forward to. A few housekeeping items before I dive in. Close captioning is available for today's event using the CC live transcript icon at the bottom right of your screen. We've received some questions in advance, but you also can submit questions in real time using the Q&A function and those questions will be routed to us in our panelists. And finally, there is an accompanying program that you can view if you'd like and that's available at rackham.umich.edu slash state. Today marks our third annual state of the graduates school event at our first in September 2019. We launched Rackham strategic vision for graduate education. Not long after sharing our vision we entered a supremely difficult period that no one had foreseen the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted nearly every facet of teaching research and scholarship, along with bringing intense personal pressures to all members of our community. The killing of George Floyd and too many other appalling instances of racialized violence by police sparked an urgent movement to address and redress institutionalized racism in America and around the world. Federal policy changes had an outsize impact on our international student community, many of whom are already experiencing a rise in hateful xenophobic rhetoric, and a deeply divisive presidential election added considerable strain. On campus, there are divisions as well. I would remiss not to acknowledge that when we gathered for the event last September, we are in the midst of a labor action by the graduate employees organization. As I noted at the time, I fully respect the advocacy of rackham students, and I value the multiple and vital roles they play at the university as students, researchers, instructors and scholars. As dean, I have been continually focused on advancing rackham's mission to support graduate education at the university, and the success of rackham students and over to come overcome the historic pressures of the last year and a half, and to respond to the broader concerns that are still present prevalent in graduate education. Today, I remain firm on my belief that we must all students, faculty, staff and alumni work together to achieve our shared goals. Those goals allow us to communicate and collaborate in areas of mutual interest, even when there are other topics about which we disagree. That idea was fundamental to launching our strategic vision to pursue a model of graduate education at the University of Michigan that is student centered faculty led and rackham supported. The means of these state of the graduate school addresses, I have committed to inform you, the rackham community about our progress to date, and the next steps that we are taking. While so much has happened since we introduced that vision that we could not anticipate. I've seen how the values and goals we arrived at through outreach to the entire rackham community have continued to guide us and to shape our work. In this year, we have identified four major goals to reimagine the academic experience to strengthen diversity equity inclusion to enhance partnerships and community, and to strengthen the culture and climate of the rackham organization. The context for this work that there's never been a greater need for individuals with advanced training and research and scholarship to address the complex humanistic, social, scientific and technological challenges that our society faces. This opportunity comes at the same time that there increased pressures on the graduate training model, particularly for doctoral education. The pressures include pressure on the apprenticeship model of graduate education that we have used and reproduced for more than 100 years. The need for academic programs to prepare rackham students for the broad range of careers in which they can participate, given that more than half of rackham doctoral students already pursue careers outside the Academy. Concerns for the mental health and well being of members of the rackham community, which are increasingly well documented, and the rare but unacceptable abuses of the faculty student mentoring relationship that is fundamental to the work that we do. Today I would like to share details of some critical initiatives, all of which align with our strategic goals that my rackham colleagues and I are pursuing with an array of campus partners. I will highlight planning around the following areas. The rackham doctoral internship program will be the first topic. Then supporting the rackham merit fellowship program, reconsidering the use of the graduate record examination GRE, graduate student mental health, well being and disability accommodations. I'd like to begin first with a discussion of the rackham doctoral internship program. As I mentioned at the beginning of the beginning, my colleague Professor Rita Chin has been working with teams of faculty members on topics related to our goal to reimagine the academic experience of doctoral students. The aim of these efforts has been to work on projects connected to one of two themes. And these are priorities that were identified by participants at our national symposium on grad education in February of 2020. These two themes are the first year or early doctoral experience and career professional development. We asked faculty from participating departments to frame their work with the following central questions. What is student center graduate education look like what specific knowledge skills tools and structures to graduate students need to succeed in their programs. And what are the challenges and barriers to implementing proposed changes. One of the clearest ideas to emerge from these discussions with the graduate training today requires more than just exceptional academic preparation. doctoral students conduct research, think and write at the highest level, possess expertise that is in demand across a broad range of fields in our knowledge driven world. Today's careers, whether in academia, industry, government or nonprofit sectors, demand an additional set of skills and experiences. So doctoral students must now be able to collaborate within diverse environments, analyze complex problems using interdisciplinary approaches, communicate advanced knowledge effectively and provide leadership that inspires others. So for this reason, RACM is pursuing an historic shift in how University of Michigan doctoral students are trained and prepared for their careers. The RACM doctoral internship program will allow selected doctoral candidates to pursue a fully supported internship as part of their graduate training. Internships offer students a professional experience in government, startups, nonprofits and corporate settings, while being tailored to meet the needs of those partner organizations. The RACM initiative provides a crucial experiential learning opportunity for students, one that not only illustrates the value of their training for employers in a wide array of fields, but also demonstrates the applicability of their skills and research in diverse professional settings. Students already commonly acquire professional experience and research and teaching as part of their doctoral programs curriculum and training. The internship program introduces a third kind of professional experience. The programs can now also integrate into their curriculum. This experience offers students the chance to translate their experience and research and scholarship into practice. Through internship opportunities that are available during the academic year, as well as during the summer, this program will offer students maximal flexibility for incorporating these vital experiences into their doctoral education. For those students, the program exposes them to a professional development experience that prepares them for a broader set of career possibilities and professional aspirations. For graduate programs and faculty, it provides an important and distinctive offering that will help attract outstanding prospective students. And for internship site partners, it provides the opportunity to form professional relationships with our excellent doctoral students and engage with them to solve problems in their fields of interest. One element of the program is that RACM will financially support the internship program just like other RACM fellowships through the generosity and vision of our alumni and donor community. We will also assist in maintaining partnerships with internship hosts. As we pilot this program across all the divisions of RACM, we will support up to 30 internships this year and 50 in the next with additional growth in later years. The program in the humanities and social sciences is already up and running, and we'll plan for the launch of new phases and other disciplines later this academic year. To further assist this effort, RACM will invest in a new position to support our internship initiative. This position will be part of a new team focused on student professional development and engagement led by associate Dean Chin and our RACM colleagues Laura Shram and Debbie Willis. By establishing internships as a new cornerstone of doctoral education, we affirm the university's commitment to pairing our students as research leaders who are ready to meet the challenges ahead. Next, I'd like to speak about supporting the RACM Merit Fellowship Program. The largest single investment of RACM Graduate School is the RACM Merit Fellowship Program or RMF. The RMF is to recruit, support and graduate outstanding students who contribute to the UM's goals of climate, inclusion, excellence and diversity. This prestigious fellowship is itself a recruitment tool and RMF specific activities throughout a student's graduate career provide growth opportunities and support. The fellowship is also an incentive for departments and programs to create inclusive and student-centered climates in which all students thrive. Shortly after we launched our strategic vision, I announced a multi-stage review of the RMF program to best position it for the future. This included a RACM self-study team and an external faculty review committee. In order to better achieve RMF goals, both of these entities recommended that RACM reorganize to bring together different elements of the RMF program as one team. In consistent with that recommendation, this complex and crucial program requires both the dedicated leadership of an associate dean, as well as the resources and creativity of a multifunctional team to achieve its goals. Consequently, RACM has created a team led by associate dean Anna Mapp, LSA's Edwin Fidejas, collegiate professor of chemistry and a research professor in the Life Sciences Institute. And working with RACM lead directors Emma Floris Scott and Ida Faye Webster. With these changes, RACM will contribute nearly 3.5 million towards new RMF program and fellowships in the next three years. You'll be hearing more from us in the next academic year as we solicit your feedback about plans for partnership to better achieve the goals of the RMF program. I also continue to engage with the additional recommendations of the external review committee and remain in dialogue with the RACM community about our plans and progress. The next topic is reconsidering the use of the graduate record examination. A major focus of RACM's DNI strategic plan is the development of policy changes that substantively address inequities in the graduate admission process and in doing so strengthen the diversity and excellence of RACM programs. To that end, RACM Graduate School has long promoted the use of holistic admissions practices and graduate education. Holistic admission practices evaluate the skills, experience, knowledge and potential of an applicant by considering the academic, professional and personal record along multiple dimensions. An opportunity to further advance our admission practices has arisen upon review of the use of the graduate record examination, the GRE general test here at the university. This review encompassed the substantial research literature indicating that the GRE general test scores are not predictive of critical measures of success in doctoral studies. It was further supported by lessons learned during the pandemic, during which there was a near universal moratorium on using GRE general test scores in graduate admissions. For many years, RACM has neither used the GRE as a selection factor in any of its fellowships, nor based any assessment of program success or excellence on student GRE test scores. Through its annual admissions workshop, RACM has worked collaboratively with programs to develop holistic admissions practices that either exclude or deemphasize the GRE. In the last five years, many graduate programs at Michigan and elsewhere have ended the use of GRE test scores in doctoral admissions decisions. Extensive research demonstrates that the GRE general test is a poor indicator of doctoral student success in graduate school, particularly with respect to measures of success that we care about the most, like degree completion, and the performance of research and scholarship. Using these scores furthermore can extend the harmful legacies of unequal access to doctoral education on the basis of race, gender, and socioeconomic status. The submission of GRE scores also creates unnecessary financial and logistical barriers that deter well qualified students from applying for doctoral studies. As a result, RACM is now pursuing a community discussion with the goal of ending the use of GRE and doctoral program admissions, beginning with the 2020-23 admission cycle. If this change is enacted, GRE general test scores will no longer be collected on the RACM application for use in doctoral admissions at the University of Michigan. Plenary discussion of the use of the GRE and graduate admissions was held with chairs and directors of RACM programs and the RACM Executive Board during the winter 2021 term. There will be further opportunity for the RACM community to comment on and discuss the proposed change. These opportunities will include graduate faculty forums be held later this fall, a mechanism for all members of the graduate community to provide written feedback on the proposed change, and the solicitation of feedback from RACM doctoral programs about its impact and ways that RACM can support the change if enacted. Input received from these feedback mechanisms will be made available to the RACM Executive Board, which will advise me with respect to the proposed change. And to make a decision about the proposed change by the end of fall term 2021 and communicate the outcome to the RACM community. I believe enacting this policy will demonstrate to prospective students that the University of Michigan is broadly committed to offering equitable access to doctoral education and evaluating applicants for doctoral admission based on the skills, experiences, knowledge and potential that are instrumentals to success in doctoral study, research and scholarship. Finally, in these remarks, I would like to discuss steps we are taking to promote graduate student mental health and well-being and to support graduate students seeking disability accommodations. In June 2019, RACM set up a task force on graduate student mental health. The charge was to identify major factors that influence graduate student mental health with the goal of identifying changes that the RACM community itself can make to better support student well-being. The task force included faculty, staff, students and mental health professionals. The task force released a year one report that included 10 recommendations. The full report and my letter from last year accepting their recommendations can be found on the RACM website. The task force followed up with a year two report that is now available on the RACM website as well. Another recommendation that we have already implemented is to work with doctoral programs to create a normative expectation that all doctoral students and their faculty mentors will have discussions that lead to written mentoring plans. We are engaging in conversations with graduate programs about this on a rolling basis through our annual RACM program review. The first set of discussions are beginning this fall. Another key recommendation of the task force was the creation of a standing committee in order to meet the goals for long term improvements. In response, I'm pleased to announce the creation of the RACM committee on graduate student mental health and well-being. This committee will, among other projects, work to create resources so that graduate programs are better equipped to support the well-being of their own students at every level from ways of connecting and communicating to types of academic policies. This committee will be similar to our faculty committee on mentoring, the more committee, it will have a diversity of perspective similar to that of the task force, including a mix of students, faculty and staff. The chair of the committee will facilitate integration of RACM's work on graduate student mental health with related work going on across campus. Through such connection to the campus efforts, RACM will seek to impact issues that are bigger than ourselves, such as the well-being of the faculty and staff who themselves support students and the role of policing in student mental health and well-being. RACM additionally recognizes that mental health is direct and disparate consequences for the academic success of graduate students, and therefore needs the continuous attention of RACM programs, staff and faculty. Building on the foundation of the task force's work, we're also creating a new team at RACM that will be led by Associate Dean Arthur Verhote, along with RACM colleague Darlene Ray Johnson. This team will include a new RACM funded position devoted to graduate program needs for stepped up support of graduate student mental health and well-being. It is important to note that this new position will not provide direct graduate student counseling, but instead will work with graduate programs to provide programmatic supports that are based on the recognition that well-being and academic success are interdependent and dynamic, and that prioritizing student well-being supports academic success. This important work resonates well with the Okanagan Charter, which the University of Michigan officially adopted earlier this month to demonstrate its commitment to becoming a health promoting campus. That same position will also provide RACM with new capacity to address graduate program needs to better support graduate students with disabilities. This area of focus follows from the report of the RACM graduate student experiences with disability accommodations committee, whose full report is also available on our website. The committee was convened in fall 2019 following reports from graduate students with disabilities and their faculty mentors, which related negative experiences with attempts to receive academic and employment based disability accommodations. It is clear from the committee's findings that rectifying these deficiencies needs to be a central part of our diversity equity inclusion goals as a graduate school. And I look forward to steps the new team will be able to take in the coming year, specifically in the space of improving education and compliance for disability accommodations in RACM graduate programs. So in conclusion, I realized that the plans I've outlined today are a lot to absorb in just a short amount of time. We will post and share the video of this event in the next few days, along with links to the information that I've mentioned. I want to be sure that everyone in the RACM community has access to these proposals and initiatives so that you can provide feedback and help them take shape. There will also be numerous ways for members of our community to engage in this work. Students I'd like to remind you that RACM student government hosts lunch with the dean's events which are held each term, and I encourage you to participate to share your thoughts and questions. We're interested in hearing from graduate faculty and programs about the RACM doctoral internship program. We like to gauge your interest and get to know how you envision your students taking advantage of this new offering. As I mentioned with regard to use of the GRE scores and admission, we will be sending out invitations to faculty forums to be held on November 11 and 12, during which we hope to solicit your feedback. We're also actively seeking partner graduate programs to pilot the advocate program focused on student mental health and well being. Finally, later this academic year, we will launch a workshop titled Beyond Compliance featuring ideas and best practices for supporting graduate students with disabilities. I would also like to emphasize that RACM values its collaboration with its graduate coordinators and we are excited to hear from and work with you in these efforts in the year to come. So with that, I would like to thank you for all for all of you for being here today and for your partnership and supporting RACM's mission to foster the success of our students. I look forward to the panel discussion to come into the opportunity to address as many questions as time allows afterwards. Thank you. I now like to turn things over to my colleague associate Dean Rita Chen, who will begin the panel discussion. Rita over to you. Thanks Mike. So this panel brings together faculty and student participants from RACM's advancing new directions and graduate education initiative. RACM launched this program in May of 2020 to catalyze a reimagination of doctoral training as student centered and faculty led. As Dean Solomon mentioned it grew out of the National Symposium on the future of graduate education that RACM hosted in February of 2020, just before the pandemic shut down. The new direction and grad initiative then represents RACM's efforts to foster faculty leadership in rethinking what doctoral education looks like in departments and at the program level. We believe that the solutions to current challenges and graduate education must be worked out by faculty in their own programs and in relation to practices within their own disciplines and fields. Our approach has been to partner with faculty and create support structures for their program level reform work in two core areas, the first year or early doctoral experience and embedding career and professional development and doctoral training. This afternoon, we've invited faculty and student participants from the first year of the initiative to join in a panel discussion about the work that they've done. So let me introduce them briefly. I'm happy to welcome Jeremy Bassis, Associate Professor of Climate Sciences and Earth and Environmental Sciences. Jay Cook, Professor of History and American Studies. Lauren Han, doctoral candidate in Communication and Media Studies. And Levy Hussin, Associate Professor of English Language and Literature. And Rob Mickey, Associate Professor of Political Science. So thank you all for being here. Why don't we start with you Jeremy. The project that you and the Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering team undertook was a response to student demand. Can you tell us a little bit about what your students were asking for and how you sought to provide it. Thanks for having us here, Rita. So our graduate programs recently focused on developing improved understanding of climate and space environments. We're scientists and engineers by training. But over the past decade, we have seen an acceleration in climate trigger disasters. And we're increasingly transitioning to this era where scientists made predictions about what happened to an era where we're living with the consequences of climate change. And we just think about what we've seen the past couple years we started with the largest forest fires in Australia's history. And I can't see you but you probably will all admit that you forgot about the 2019 2020 forest fires because the pandemic hit in March, and the forest fires that kind of petered out by February. But we've kind of continued and seen forest fires in California drought hurricanes flooding. And what we are a team of Allison Steiner Mike Lamona myself kind of seeing is that what we in our students really started to see is a strong disconnect between climate science that we're kind of interested in, and the increasingly dire community need to adapt and mitigate to the disasters. And so our response was to really think about a couple of things. And one of the things we did we developed a certificate program. And along with that a new project based course for our PhD students, and the project based course students could work directly with communities to understand their needs and then help develop adaptation and mitigation needs that were informed by the climate And we really wanted to specifically partner with vulnerable communities, because we know that these communities are most at risk, and often have asymmetric asymmetric access to information and resources. And you know, despite COVID and we're doing this new project during COVID, you know it really worked and it worked because I had a great set of teammates including Allison and Mike. But really for the projects, our students were pretty spectacular, and they really stepped up and our first project was incredibly successful. Thanks Jeremy. Rob, the political science team was also seeking to meet a student need. What was the challenge that political science wanted to address. And our immediate challenge I'm sure this is true for a lot of departments was COVID. We decided to shrink our incoming grad cohorts for a few years in order to create fellowships for current students whose work and lives were disrupted by COVID. So we didn't realize that moving to smaller cohorts would have lots of implications that we hadn't really thought about before, such as the size of grad classes the number of courses we could offer pre lens, the broader purpose of milestone such as pre lens on the road to residency, etc. We thought it'd be useful to do a broader rethink of our program. And we were kind of lucky enough to decide to do that broader rethink right as your initiative was advertised. The initiative was very helpful. In a lot of ways. First funding from the initiative allowed us to help incoming students during the summer before they officially begin their studies to help them get prepared for our first year methods coursework this coursework produces a lot of anxiety. It's kind of imposter syndrome on steroids for a lot of students, helping students, not just intellectually, but just accommodate themselves, accultrate themselves to Ann Arbor, get used to us, get some mentoring earlier is really useful in that regard. And so the initiative helped us fund a three week boot camp of additional instruction to get them ready for their methods coursework. We're also holding a writing workshop next summer for all of our students to help them with their writing and including kind of special workshops for writing for non academic audiences. That's great Rob. So, after working last year on the math boot camp to sort of help a chunk of your students sort of hit the ground running in terms of the methods courses, and then designing this writing workshop that you guys will be piloting next year. Can you tell us a little bit about how your efforts to reform the political science doctoral program ultimately started to expand. Sure, those ideas really grew out of discussion with faculty and other programs on zoom last year, even programs that are structured very, very differently than ours. So you mean workshops that we had kind of facilitate right that we're part of this advancing new directions. And programs and departments with very different challenges in ours different size, etc. But just listening to those really helped us ask and try to start to answer broader questions about the purpose of our program, and how we might want to alter it. So our department is now deliberating a bunch of recommendations that we developed and these range from moving from seminars to a lab model for much of our graduate instruction which had never really existed before in political science to removing some milestones on the way to moving students to prospectus writing workshops much earlier and generally providing much more support including early support for students who get here and announce or at least announce that they're considering nonacademic careers. These students may want to acquire different training. It's not something that we're that we've really, it's something that we welcome, but it's not something that we've really rethought our curriculum to help them perhaps write a different kind of dissertation for these careers, and so on. Thanks, Rob. So, Jay, in contrast to the to the political science team, the history team started with a very ambitious and agenda. What was the big vision that informed your work. Yeah, that's that's right. We entered into this project with Rackham thinking pretty big we basically ordered everything on your menu. We didn't want to simply tinker around the edges of existing requirements, but rather to think more ambitiously and comprehensively about our modes of training as a whole. We began with two basic principles. We wanted to make an affirmative argument for the power of historical research by showing it in action, that is in concrete public facing projects trying to do good in the wider world. And we wanted to expand our modes of training beyond single authored essays pitched for other specialists. In practice, this meant doing more than simply relying on the older platitudes about how history teaches good writing and research skills or critical thinking and cross cultural empathy. While we continue to believe in all of those things very strongly, we've steadily shifted our collective energies to showing these values in action, what we like to call history at work in the wider world. But this in turn meant reconsidering our basic blueprints for teaching, mentoring and student assessment blueprints we'd not really touched for quite some time. In another way, we saw this collaboration with Rackham as an opportunity to stretch and experiment in a variety of new directions. Specifically, we added a new pro seminar for our first year cohorts to address questions of equity and inclusion, build community and arm them with a number of graduate school survival skills not taught in our regular courses. Second, we developed a whole new category of graduate course, what we now refer to as our U of M history labs. We designed these project based courses to teach collaboration across a multi generational team of faculty and students. The larger goal being to produce a much wider range of public facing deliverables, digital archives exhibitions, policy briefs, film documentaries. Third, we developed a professional development seminar to expose our second and third year students to a range of transferable skills from digital literacy and grant writing to the challenges of oral and written communication for non academic publics. Finally, we've tried to develop semester long PhD internships, tailored specifically for historians. The goal here was to expand the range of actual work experiences being offered to our students. While the majority of our students in history still dream of careers as tenured professors. It seemed important to present them with a wider spectrum of examples for how their training might be mobilized and really valued in multiple professional cases. In many cases, we've learned that training in other sectors actually makes our PhD students better scholars and more competitive for multiple kinds of jobs, regardless of what professional trajectory they ultimately decide to pursue. So it sounds like history had a lot of different ideas about the ways that wanted to transform its graduate program. What were some of the challenges that you faced in in in trying to realize this big vision. Yeah, that's right there are quite a few built in challenges from questions of money and sustainability to the more amorphous process we always talk about as culture change. The basic challenge I think involved faculty by it. Simply put history is the largest unit in the humanities division and one of the biggest departments in LSA. So given those parameters we knew going in that we would never simply come to a quick and easy consensus, but we also didn't want to impose these goals in any kind of unilateral top down way. We started by trying to build ground swells of excitement and interest, capitalizing on a number of developments that were already underway within our community. A few years ago, we began to realize that many of our faculty and PhD students were already doing lots of impressive public facing work, like writing op-eds for national newspapers, producing podcasts, consulting for think tanks, serving as expert witnesses, blogging for large audiences on issues of global concern, and so forth. In some cases, our very best PhD students arrived at U of M telling us that academia was too small a pond for the kinds of work they ultimately wanted to pursue. Many of us that is to say we're already thinking very ambitiously and strategically about how to communicate our research to the widest possible audiences. For the most part though, we've not really thought about how this public engagement work would transform our modes of training. What we've learned over time is that it's relatively easy to convince a number of our faculty and PhD students to dive into a handful of internships or history labs. That's some really nice wins, I think, since 2018 for ongoing internships, a student run podcast program that's been hugely successful, and close to a dozen different history labs across a variety of different subfields. We've partnered with ProQuest, the National Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, the American Historical Association, our big national organization, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Museum of the City of London. At a certain point though, this early proof of concept starts to beg some related policy questions. Should we require every one of our 140 plus PhD students to participate in one of these labs as part of their regular coursework? Should every student in our program complete at least one semester long internship outside of their teaching as a GSI? Many of my colleagues believe very strongly that these pilots should be further expanded and perhaps even folded into our core requirements. If we've seen in practice that these opportunities improve the overall quality of student work, and if we know from recent examples that these internship opportunities have really helped our students in different kinds of job markets, why not think more seriously about embedding them at the center of our PhD program? It's a pretty big leap though to go from a handful of successful pilots to changing core requirements or funding packages for a program as big as U of M history. Simply thinking through the downstream effects in the context of COVID is not an easy feat. Nor is it easy to convince one's colleagues that doubling down on specialized training in the context of COVID may not really be in anyone's best interests. Big departments are unwieldy beasts and simply trying to convince a majority of faculty and PhD students to let go of the older zero sums between plan A, tenure track job, and plan B, compelling work in other job sectors is an ongoing challenge that requires a lot of ground level messaging, patience and reinforcement. And most importantly, perhaps it requires the collaboration and support of a larger entity like Rackham. So you've talked a lot about the different challenges and I just want to remind our audience that it would be great to have questions for the panelists once we're done with our discussion. So Aida, the English team's goal was to embed professional development into the doctoral program. That also is a pretty big lift. You knew that this reform was going to need to address faculty buy-in somehow. What strategies did you guys take to bring both faculty and doctoral students along? Yeah, so I'll start if I may with just a word or two of kind of a diagnostic vision where you'll hear some predictable resonances with my co-panelists from large departments history and policy in particular. So English is similarly a large and somewhat decentralized department, but also a department that had the benefit of a kind of existing foundation for thinking about professional development. Our previous department chair, David Porter had designed and launched some really exciting initiatives well before our project was underway. For several years now in English we've had panels and elective coursework devoted to career exploration. We've had a funded summer internship program. But while this kind of innovation has been really energetically embraced on some fronts by students and faculty alike, the levels of support for substantive program reform have remained somewhat uneven. So my team agreed that if we wanted to turn existing, mostly opt-in opportunities into a kind of structural program reform, commensurate to the changing landscape of professional humanities work, then we'd need to start with centralized consensus on building conversations at the department level, you know, questions about what a 21st century English PhD is for and how the current structure of our program aligns well, or in some cases less well with that vision. Our team members felt strongly that the perspectives of current students should play a key role in these conversations, both because our students are our central and respected members of our intellectual community. And because they have a uniquely valuable and urgent sense of how our training model is serving them and how it might be usefully revised. So with this logic in mind, we enlisted three student representatives, each of them was elected by their peers from one of our department's doctoral sub programs. And those three students joined our team and helped us to design and carry out a series of structured department-wide conversations. I can give you that that kind of collaborative strategy really paid off. The student reps were a great help with the conceptual development and co-facilitation of the series. And beyond that they really encouraged student turnout at meetings and modeled a kind of open constructive dialogue across departmental hierarchies, which can be really difficult to encourage. We had four department meetings that were devoted to the mission values and structure of the doctoral program, moving from a kind of abstract conceptual discourse toward more concrete milestone based conversations. And every one of those conversations had unusually robust turnout and really genuinely productive collegial conversation. We do have more work to do and our reform efforts will continue through the year. But as a result of last year's team project, we've expanded our internship program with broad support from faculty and students. We're introducing some new elective support for students at the prospectus writing stage. So that'll take shape as a workshop for prospectus writing students. And then finally, I, you know, I really think that we have a clearer sense now of shared priorities, paths forward and also fault lines that will need to be addressed as we continue our work. I'm excited that's your, the way that your team sort of decided to incorporate students into the very process of reform work. We thought was really inspiring and, you know, produce some pretty impactful results. So we've actually been really recommending for teams that are starting their projects this year to really do some student engagement around, you know, these these big conceptual questions but also around the kinds of reforms that they'd like to see. I noted that one of the related aspects of the, the English teams work was how creative it was in trying to figure out how to provide extended time to degree funding for doctoral students in the wake of COVID. How did you guys structure this extra funding for students while simultaneously trying to advance your team's goal of embedding professional development into the English doctoral program. Yeah, so it ended up being a happily symbiotic conversation the conversation about the budgetary restructuring on the one hand and the conversation about the program reform on the other hand in ways that that I think Rob has already kind of anticipated, but like many departments are restructuring and entailed temporarily reducing the size of incoming cohorts to fund extensions as necessary for more advanced students, as progress, progress, sorry, was disrupted by COVID, or current or concurrent crises. So some of the money that we recouped from cohort reduction was in the form of teaching positions and then some of the money that we recouped was in the form of fellowships. Since we have within English and existing internal infrastructure for developing and overseeing student internships we have an internship director Lisa Mackman who helps connect undergrads and grad students with with intern with industry partners within and beyond the university so we thought maybe we could make use of that. We wanted to know in short if some of the would be fellowships could be converted into academic year internships. And so we asked Rackham for permission to attach professional development stipulations to unspecified fellowship funds. We were thrilled that Rackham was was immediately supportive of this proposal, as were faculty and students in our department. I suspect that at the department level our conversations about program reform might have contributed to the degree of interest in and support for an expanded internship program. But in any case it was an easy sell. And as a result we now have a small cohort of very enthusiastic English grad students who are interning at places like U of M press, Uma, the Michigan Quarterly review and more. Much like the Rackham program from which we obviously took inspiration. Our student interns apply for the for the positions they're vetted by institutional partners and then they contract with the partner and with us to work for about 16 to 20 hours per week. So it's very similar in design to the Rackham program but we have a kind of internal conversation that's unfolding about the transferable skills that are kind of uniquely of interest and sort of lend themselves to development within the English program. So we expect our students to gain a diversified sense of possible career pathways as well as significant work experience and a sharper understanding of their transferable skills and we also hope that our students will report back to us and that they're on the job findings about a broadly construed ecosystem of the humanities professions will inform our ongoing work of reimagining the English PhD. So Lauren, I want to turn to you now, you're not a student in the English doctoral program, but you were able to do an internship with the forum on youth investment in fall of 2020. And that was part of Rackham's internship, doctoral internship pilot program. Why were you interested in pursuing this opportunity and doing an internship. Yeah, so in view of the beleaguered academic job market and the challenges facing higher education and that entire economic sector of it large, I wanted to put myself in a position to fully leverage the Rackham PhD. I've been lucky to work on productive research teams and teach and publish academically. So the internship program really stood out to me as a unique opportunity to kind of shore up my professional capabilities and to expand the opportunities available to me after graduation. And if I do decide to remain in academia. I see the public scholarship movement as key to making sure that higher ed stays socially relevant. And I saw the internship as a way to strengthen myself as both a researcher and a teacher. Can you tell us a little bit about what you did in the internship like what the project was and then kind of what difference it made in terms of your doctoral experience and thinking about careers. Absolutely. So the forum for youth investment is national and even international think tanks that brings together policymakers and youth leaders to figure out how we can change the odds for youth so that they are ready to fully participate in school and work in life by the time they hit 21. They've had a lot of communication challenges as a result of some organizational changes over the past few years and then especially the challenges brought on by COVID. So above and beyond the experiences that I had as an undergrad and a master's students, the doctoral internship required a high level synthesis of my skills, tackling messy real world data driven problems. And I feel like I gained a much better ability to translate my doctoral training to industry context and to communicate the value of the PhD beyond the faculty pipeline. I started out, like I said with these branding and organizational identity projects, and I actually ended up advising the executive vice president and the managing director on things like organizational efficacy leadership team productivity. And they've kept me on board after the internship as a paid independent consultant, and I am loving it. So overall, I just feel butter equipped to tackle the job market, whether I remain in academia or venture beyond its bounds, and I'm especially grateful that the internship program was fully funded and fully integrated into my program because otherwise I've not been able to participate. You're kind of saying that, I mean, we've talked before and you said that if the internship opportunity had only been in the summer, that isn't something that you would have been able to do but that having it offered as an opportunity during the academic year and as part of, you know, like your funding that it became possible for you to do it. Yeah, that was an absolutely essential piece of the puzzle, like some of the co panelists have mentioned. I know Rackham is thinking strategically about modes of training and how to position its graduates to be most competitive and on the graduate side we're thinking about that as well. Without knowing if I'm going to remain in academia or venture into all that industry, it would not have made sense for me to jeopardize that summer to jeopardize more chances to publish or to jeopardize any of those further progress to degree requirements in order to do the internship. But because it was a source of funding because it was legitimized in that way to my department as well into my bank account, I was able to fully participate and I think get the most out of that experience. That's great. Thanks, Lauren. So Jay the history doctoral program as you'd already mentioned, had identified internships as a key component of its efforts to embed professional development. In fact, the department has invested considerable in resources and creating internal internship opportunities I guess kind of like English. History see these experiences are so important. And what kinds of opportunities was the department able to develop. First I probably just echo Lauren that we, you know, wanted to try to help our PhD students get out of that kind of zero some choice and thinking about summers, you know, working on prelims or dissertation chapter, or diving into something, you know, with transferable skills and new professional context. I mean basically we began with the premise that a robust mix of hands on work experiences was a key component of our efforts to diversify our modes of training. And to be honest, it seemed kind of odd to ask our students to think about a broader range of professional trajectories, if the only work experiences we even offered them in a six year PhD program was classroom teaching. So unlike many other units in the sciences and engineering the only real work opportunities that are offered across much of the humanities and social sciences involve running discussion sections as a GSI. So we therefore decided to invest significant amounts of time, labor and resources, and in history's case that meant, you know, fundraising, talking to donors and alums to develop our own pilot internship programs with pro quest here in Ann Arbor, the American Historical Association in Washington DC, and the Clements Library here at U of M, and we also developed a customized kind of bespoke, you know, digital skills internship within our own department to lead our student run podcast program reverb effect with this person serving as the editor, the producer of the podcast that we were generating over the past three years, since we rolled these out more than a dozen of our PhD students have participated in the pilots. And in some cases, I think these pilots have really been game changers opening up entirely new skill sets and professional opportunities for our students. So, some of the internship opportunities that the department developed that history developed actually got passed on to rack them to incorporate into the doctoral internship program that Dean Solomon just announced. What were some of the motivations for this move. The quick answer is that it's a lot of work and quite expensive for a department to try to manage a robust internship program covering lots of different job sectors, entirely on its own. Well, we've been pleased to see that the unit level, we've pleased been pleased to serve as the unit level catalyst for the four pilots that I just mentioned. The programs have steadily expanded and grown in number. We realized pretty quickly that we just didn't have the resources or the staff support to run a large graduate level internship program across multiple kinds of work and job sectors, entirely on our own. This really strikes me as the kind of place or context in which partnering with a larger unit like Rackham can make a critical difference from basic things like cost sharing on stipends and health benefits to vetting multiple application cycles running orientations for the new interns, managing weekly check ins with lots of different students going through these internships, and so on and so forth. If you really want to do this right, it requires a large institutional commitments of staff resources and logistical support, larger than most units can handle on their own. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, um, there were so many really creative curricular and program level innovations that came out of all of your effort last year. One of the highlights of the partnership with Rackham has been the series of workshops that we convened around specific challenges that we thought you might face in your reform work. Jeremy, can you tell us a little bit about how you experienced the workshops. Yeah. So, as one of the only stem program science and engineering, I had first thought that we would be a little bit on the outside or that our challenges would be different. But we eventually realized that the broad themes that we're really talking about are pretty common across programs. And so one of the big things that I think is a big theme across all of us was professional development. And, you know, the fundamental challenge I think we all face in thinking about our graduate programs and how do we re-envision them so that our programs train students they have the skills and tools to engage in all the problems we face as a society. In that case, it's pretty clear that we need to adapt to a changing climate. But in general, we need to evolve our programs so that they do train students for a wider spectrum of careers that are impactful both inside and outside of academia and not thinking of that as being one or the other, because the truth is that they inform each other. In terms of strategies, getting buy-in and support from the faculty for programs that are diverging from what we've historically done from programs that are really challenging students outside of the traditional scope of academia is something that we really had a lot of commonalities in, and it was useful to talk to other people. One of the big issues that I think a lot of programs, and we certainly thought about was that we had to make sure that students get credit for the activities and it's just not piling on top of existing requirements, because then that's going to scare everyone away. So we have to figure out what we want to give up what we're willing to give up to move these programs forward. And really, I think one of the real benefits for me, especially as we're doing this during COVID was kind of getting a sense of excitement from the other teams, is that I think it pushed us to be far more ambitious than we would have been otherwise. And at times it felt like every time we go to these meetings, we would kind of start with something that was incremental and get pushed closer and closer to the edge of the cliff until it was a little bit more ambitious. And then meanwhile, Rita and John were out cutting up the nets beneath us until eventually we were pushed over and ended up doing something far more ambitious than what we had really initially planned on. I think it was without that sense of excitement where, you know, listening to our colleagues talk, you know, now I want to be a PhD student in history and English and all these other programs right because it's exciting to hear what other people are talking about. Thanks, that's great Jeremy. Rita, what about you, what was your perspective on the cross disciplinary discussions. I would echo just about everything Jeremy said except for those aspects of his, his comments that were science specific. I also felt a real sense of pleasant surprise about the ease with which my team found common cause with colleagues working across a range of disciplines I felt that the, the kind of routine meetings really built a sense of shared enterprise and that was reassuring in and of itself. And then it also the meetings also provided us with kind of concrete models and examples of how we might envision new projects within English so you know I felt like my colleagues came to those meetings with a real spirit of generosity. I found it really energizing to learn about histories podcast for example or the humanities clusters and cross departmental pros seminar and those were both, you know things that I first heard about in the group meetings and then had later follow up conversations with colleagues about to really kind of dig deeper and I would say I guess that hearing about the nuts and bolts of those initiatives really made them seem approachable and just kind of expanded my sense of what's possible. And Rob, can you tell us a little bit about how the group workshops influence your own increasingly ambitious agenda. I'm sure I mean first I'll note that the academic job market has long been and remains much more favorable for our discipline, including our students than for the humanities. And one implication of that is that it makes it a little bit more difficult to call for large changes when in the view of most of our faculty and our students the program isn't facing these serious structural problems. And along with a, I don't know a fairly risk averse departmental culture meant that we poly sci faculty can get pretty easily stuck in traditional ways of thinking. And it's not just coven that causes departments to be pretty isolated and even parochial at least for us. Well it sounds minor I think just, first of all just dedicating the time is huge right that just seems obvious but if you hadn't made us go to these workshops, we, right we wouldn't have had all these discussions and listen to all these brilliant people talk not just about their challenges but it was great to for us to hear them puzzle through their responses to these challenges out loud. And policy our reform emphasis has been on helping students move much more quickly toward their own research agendas, and several of our proposals, such as prospectus writing workshops and ideas about how to structure those reflect directly reflect these conversations. So we're very grateful. Well, thank you. I mean, we've been really grateful for all of your partnership. And we're grateful for you taking the time out of your day to tell us a little bit about the projects and the efforts that you've made to rethink graduate education at the university level. So Rackham is continuing to partner with all of you guys in your with your teams and it's also launching new programs and projects with chemistry, mechanical engineering and biostatistics this year. I also want to say a big thanks to Lauren to Lauren Han for sharing her experience as one of the very first doctoral candidates to participate in Rackham's doctoral internship program. With that, I'd like to open the floor up to questions and thought that maybe we could start with with you, Mike. I'm here. Hello. Thanks. I was hoping to get a get a question to the panelists as we're maybe give the other participants some time to type out their questions. So really enjoyed seeing just all this together like what what's accomplished the distance you traveled, you know, amazing to think about this happening during the pandemic. And the first part of the panel like, you know, the, the willingness to try new modalities, you know, new, new goals, new ways of, of, you know, just the idea of hearing about labs as opposed to seminars like it just really expands for me the scope of what's possible. I have to say, particularly at the end there that last exchange that, you know, Jeremy and I and Robert that you had around the excitement and you know it strikes me as just evidence of health and vitality to be for programs to kind of kind of get into this work in the way that you have and, and not just within your own programs but then the engagement across programs. I think my question is related to maybe what came before you all kind of showed up to that first meeting. So I'm imagining, you know, there's some faculty on this call that are thinking, wow, there's some things I could do in my discipline that would, you know, both be good for students but also be good for the discipline. I should just talk a little bit about if to that faculty member, you know, what would be the what is the first step or is there a common first step that you all would recommend and this might be, you know, for you all having how would this look for yourselves or just even something you've seen from all working together. Jeremy, yes. Yes, I'll start because we work at Allison Steiner and I have been working for a couple years with Rackham on a couple of precursor programs, and kind of this evolved from a previous program in which we recognize that we had a group of students that went off and did really engaged work after their PhD, but every single one of them carved their own path. So we wanted to add a little bit of structure to that. And so one of the things that we did is just brought back a bunch of those students in a panel to talk to them about their experiences and then we brought back a bunch of practitioners who had made that transition in a panel and we were supposed to have a third panel but then COVID hit, and we quite didn't quite manage to finish that off. So this project was kind of really a natural outgrowth of this thinking that we had had through our program that our students want this option but there isn't a structure and we want to provide structure to provide it. I could briefly add on if, if there's time. I would say much as much as Jeremy has already said that English was on a kind of on ramp toward doctoral program reform, and before we were invited to participate in this, in this project. I would, I would hasten to assure anyone who's considering joining the project is that Rackham provides a good deal of scaffolding along the way so. So our reform efforts were in some ways and unconsolidated and or incremental in nature, and Rackham really invited us at that outset to do a lot of organized diagnostic work about the program that helped us to think through and kind of prioritize our possible avenues for reform. There was useful homework and kind of a number of follow up conversations with the Rackham team that really helped us to to find our path so it didn't feel like we were just kind of left out to do our own thing but but at the same time it felt that we were given kind of authorship over our project. I had one quick thing which is and I agree with all of that I actually blocked out the homework I'd forgotten we had done on that. But I think taking the temperature of the students is a critical thing to do before you join in our students administer their own survey of themselves. And that just not just talking to faculty but also talking to students. Some who sometimes are not always the best judge of of their own education in the moment but there are oftentimes they're a lot more creative and insightful than the old faculty are so that was really useful for us that we did that. Another thing I might add is that in some cases I think it begins with a localized good idea, you know from a member of your community, and then imagining ways to build that kind of scaffolding or infrastructure around it to start scaling it up and thinking about it across a large unit. So for example of that I think, you know is this history lab program that we've built over the last three or four years. It didn't begin, you know with a blank page or a, you know, clean slate, it actually began with some models that were starting to emerge organically and my colleague Alex Stern who's the associate dean for the humanities in LSA and developed this really interesting project called the sterilization lab from her work on eugenics. There was a joint kind of project between the medical school and history in LSA. And that in turn inspired my colleagues Matt Lasseter who developed a history lab project on racial profiling and policing in Detroit from the Civil Rights era onward. Jesse Hofnum Garskopf who developed immigration kind of justice lab for asylum seekers coming from Central America to Southeastern Michigan, you know wanting to work with lawyers and provide them with historical research and resources to understand the diversity of trajectories for how people end up seeking asylum in Detroit or it's Lanny. And then pings to the graduate level where Rita and my colleague Jeff Eidlinger developed this partnership with the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC to teach a graduate level history lab with the museum and those individual kind of brilliant ideas we started to imagine what a larger program would look like, and to figure out the logistics and the infrastructure to kind of make it accessible and possible for people across our very big unit and so it's been incredibly hard to get to the point where I have colleagues from Berkeley or UT Austin emailing and saying, How do you do that, like what's behind the curtain, and I think Rackham, you know, has been crucial in kind of helping units take these ideas at the grassroots and imagine ways to turn them into program changes. Thanks, thanks so much it's really helpful to see that progress to know more about that progression. Thanks. So, Jeremy, there's a question from the audience that specifically to you. It says you mentioned having to think about what program requirements to give up in order to work in the new programs. What was decided for this and was it difficult to get faculty agreement. It's always difficult to get faculty agreement on anything, right, I mean, and it's all fun and games when you propose to do something that doesn't affect anybody else's pet programs and it's when you start interfering that you're going to get a little bit more descent. And so our strategy, the answer that question is we haven't really decided what to give up but what we decided to do was build in flexibility. So students have the option to take this course for multiple credits. And so they could put whatever time commitment they were willing to make into it. The other thing that we were able to do is because there are specific journals that are devoted to this type of scholarship students can actually submit peer reviewed papers and this can be included as part of the dissertation. So that isn't just in instead of work on your dissertation, it can be included as part of the dissertation. And so by integrating it with their scholarship. It gives us a little bit more of an opportunity so that isn't just a thing that they're doing on top of their regular academic portfolio. I think the rest of the panelists have anything to say about this because the question of what to give up was certainly recurring conversation that we had. I just maybe I would agree with this being coming from large departments that can be pretty decentralized. Sometimes our differences of opinion say on the purpose of the prelim, when it should happen, how important is it. We don't have prelims at all. Right. Sometimes those disagreements fall along kind of sub sub sub field lines. So we avoided a huge fight at the departmental level by saying, Okay, fine, you and your, your people can do it your way but these other sub fields are going to maybe push forward with reforms a little bit earlier so I was just going to say I definitely think it's it's really important to start with those big conversations like what is the purpose of the PhD, and to have PhD students in front of the room, facilitating those conversations and you know, mediating and structuring those conversations. What we've seen in practice is that you can run into these kinds of structural barriers where they're very specific pressure points in terms of what is what would need to go or be reduced in order to open up new possibilities in history that can include things like should students be required to write a second original seminar paper, a research paper as part of the program. Some of my colleagues have responded to the, you know, difficult humanities job market by saying yes, a second research paper is crucial, maybe another publication, maybe a, you know, head start on the dissertation. But that makes it harder right to open up the space for a lab course that pushes and other kinds of directions. And when I talk about this sometimes with people at the national level, you know, thinking about the job crisis and the humanities. You know, they shake their heads and say, why would you require a second seminar paper in a very specialized mode of training instead of opening up the first opportunity to try out other kinds of transferable skills as part of the degree process. But those those questions and choices are really, you know, deeply embedded in everything we're talking about. Yeah. So, Mike, there are some questions here that are really for you as opposed to the panel are you open to taking a few of those. Yeah, sure. Thanks. So, I think there's a lot of interest in the question of mental health and what Rackham is doing to support graduate students with their mental health. Are there steps being taken to increase the capacity of caps for students who need more regular support. Are there plans to partner with caps to formalize an embedded counselor model for all Rackham departments. Yeah, I'm happy to address that because it's a, it's an answer that is engages Rackham like it's important to Rackham and at the same time it also kind of speaks to the broader campus effort in this space. So something. So I think it was a good timing for the Rackham task force because it had been working for about a year prior to the campus setting up its own committee to look at student mental health and well being broadly across campus. And that was an important step for the campus I think because it's at that point that we can engage questions around the capacity of caps for example. And so one thing is that, you know, I would want to say that I think any kind of health promoting approach to graduate student mental health and well being ought to kind of encompass a variety of different strategies and and and from from like a continuum of care, involving both prevention and treatment and so one place to, to address that is, is in terms of prevention wellness, both at the level of self, but also at the level of programs and so that's one place we want to invest. And then at the same time the campus committee itself did recommend that that caps in addition to the embedded counselor model that we already have we have a embedded counselor within Rackham. LSA for example has an embedded counselor that's focusing specifically on graduate students. And then a number of programs also college schools and colleges have embedded counselors caps will also change its intake model to the way it works with patients to have like a kind of a resource at the front at the front end. That should improve it prove efficiency in addition to increasing some capacity of caps and if you want to read more about that. The recommendations of the broader campus committee were made public at the end of August, and there, it's, it's a little bit it's going to be a work in progress, I think, but they have really indicated there's for thrust areas and one of them is around this continuum of care and caps is definitely a part of it. So I think we should expect to see more within this space, and also understand that I think that the, like a health promoting strategy will be thinking about the dimensions of wellness is interaction with academic stress. So I think that's one of the things that we do our work from, from, you know, as I mentioned in my remarks like how, how we engage with students but even to the effects of our academic policy on student well being. So there are a couple of questions about the GRE. One is about whether the GRE is going to be waived for students applying for master's degrees. And then the other is beyond the GRE requirement and removing that, or potentially removing that from the application. What other parts of the application are being considered for, you know, sort of revision in terms of thinking about holistic admissions practices. So, that's a great set of questions and I think what I would like to lead with is just the, just to forefront this idea about holistic admissions. So, you know, put the specific proposal of GRE aside just for five seconds, and both master's and doctoral programs, you know, Rackham's advice to programs is to, is to develop holistic admissions that really address this, the whole part of the application in terms of thinking about how those pieces kind of fit together organically in a way that's not, not numeric that really works along multiple dimensions to really evaluate skills and potential. And so I think that's a that's a general piece that is really important I think to, to forefront and it really addresses if you if you start with that I'm really struck by an interesting connection between the panel and what I just said which is you know, how do you do holistic admissions. I think the first thing you ask are, what are the goals of the degree. And then after that, your admission strategy will come from that right, just as you were all talking about what are the goals of the degree that's how you start to think about training and so I really just it's it's it's not a coincidence right I think it's very interesting that those have come up in the same panel. I want to. So I think that I would lead with that and then I want to just say a specific thing about master's programs in the GRE that at this time the proposal that we've generated for discussion does is is directed at doctoral programs and the reason for that is that the three factors that I indicated as to as to why RACM thinks that this is really a step that the whole graduate community RACM community ought to take those motivations are most strongly, the research is most strongly available for doctoral programs and so we feel most confident there. There's a for those of you that kind of look at the material that we're bringing along with this event. There is a discussion about how we're thinking about master's programs. It's something that we'd like to take up at a later date. After we have more data after we have the experience of having had this conversation around doctoral programs. So we're definitely thinking about holistic admissions in the context of master's admissions and at the same time. The proposal that we're bringing forward during this fall term is a proposal about doctoral admissions and the graduate record examination so really appreciate the question and I think the FAQ will address that this is a little bit of something that we're sequencing within our within the goals of of really trying to enact change or or discuss change possible change within a really complex organization that is our graduate school with it's more than 100 doctoral programs. So, as a last kind of question there's something that's that's very specific and practical, which is the question of whether RACM will extend the deadline for defending from with beyond winter term through August and whether RACM is considering doing that as a kind of permanent or at least something that programs can count on for the foreseeable future. I think Rita you're asking a question about the possibility of extending the grace period for submitting your doctoral dissertation in the winter term so traditionally that's been about three weeks after the end of the term. Due to the COVID due to the disruption of COVID we extended that well into the summer so more into August, and we heard that that was provided relief for programs faculty and students alike. So, so very, very interested in hearing that feedback I'm happy to hear more about that. So, a couple of things I would say is that I think we have broadly heard of the benefit from that. RACM really wants to pursue this conversation. This is a matter of academic policy and so this would be decided by the RACM Executive Board, I do plan to have a discussion with them during this academic year. I understand that for planning as students plan to complete their degrees, having this information as early as possible is important and so we'll try to move this conversation quickly. But it isn't it is one that I think it's very important that we hear from all the disciplines to make sure there's not unintended consequences. And there are some issues around federal law and immigration policy that we need to consider very carefully. So I think there'll be two questions to ask one is that should we do it again this year because we are still kind of navigating COVID and then the question of the, the question that you said is, should we make this a more permanent discussion and really happy to have that discussion and, and maybe we'll, we'll figure out some ways to get the additional feedback we would need to do that and get the provide to the Executive Board the additional information they would need from the RACM community to understand if that's a permanent policy change that we should consider. Yeah, it's a great question. Thanks. Maybe I'll function as timekeeper here I feel we does that. Okay, last question you want again otherwise I think that yeah. Okay. Well, so I think I just in light of everyone's time I want to, well first just hope, you know, express my hope that this has been interesting and helpful to you all thank you for for joining us. I'm going to, this video will be made available and we'll also send out to you just links with some of the information that's been discussed and referenced today information about the internship program the GRE discussions and the like. I also want to take a moment that if there are further questions that we didn't have time to address. I'll just go back to the column periodically in the student newsletter and to into the chairs of RACM programs. I'll try to address those in an ongoing way during the term. Also want to thank our behind the scenes team you know who you are thanks for having a what what appeared to me at least to be a flawless event technologically. A big thank you to our panelists for joining us today. I really enjoyed just hearing the, the range of it's very, very, tremendously very what you've done and also just amazingly impactful and very grateful. So, with that, I just want to thank everybody again for participating and wish you a very good afternoon. Thank you everybody.