First Annual Graduate Student Colloquim

This past year graduate students from the College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences initiated a meeting with Dean Bob Rider to discuss the possibility of organizing and staging a graduate student colloquium. Dean Rider enthusiastically supported their request, and charged them with coordinating this event. A graduate student representative from each academic department in the college was selected to serve on the Dean’s Graduate Student A dvisory Board and work on this project. Dean Rider saw this as an opportunity for providing graduate students with a venue for presenting their research findings in a professional forum.

The first annual Graduate Student Colloquium was held on March 4, 2005. The colloquium was genuinely a program “coordinated by our graduate students, for our students.” They were involved in planning every aspect of this event from selecting speakers, to producing programs and handouts. A lison Buehler, a doctoral student from the Department of Theory and Practice in Teacher Education, served as chair of the event. The keynote speaker for the colloquium was Dr. Kathy Ivey, chair of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Western Carolina University. Her speech, “Research in the Context of Graduate Studies,” emphasized the importance of acquiring strong research skills as graduate students and of establishing a research agenda while in graduate school. She challenged our graduate students to use the research skills they acquire in their graduate programs throughout their professional careers.

Graduate students from across the college were selected to make formal research presentations and to stage poster sessions. Their presentations provided a good representation of the range of graduate programs offered in the college. Formal presentations were made by the following students:

Poster presentations were made by Carolyn Albright, Andrea Becker, Serkan Bolat, Mary Brown, Keeshja Chapman, Micah Flynt, Jennifer Fortuna, Young-Hoon Hamn, Anna Herweyer, Cherilyn Hultquist, A shley Jordan, Hey-Young Kim, Hyun-Joo L ee, A ndrea Marable, A ngela Marathakis, and Kiseol Yang.

Faculty support for the Graduate Student Colloquium was evident throughout the event. Faculty engaged students in question-and-answer sessions following each presentation. This provided graduate students with beneficial feedback and an opportunity to gain experience needed for making presentations at professional conferences. We plan to make this an annual event in the college to provide our graduate students with an opportunity to share findings from their research work with fellow students, faculty, and campus administrators.