A message from the Vice Provost
Office of Graduate and Professional Education
Graduate student career development
Charles Riordan
Welcome to the inaugural issue of GradImpact, a
newsletter designed to explore the University of
Delaware's growing graduate enterprise and
reveal its impact on local, national and global communities.
The scope of graduate education at UD has never been
greater—in the past several years, faculty have developed
new programs in areas including economics education,
water science and policy, music education, nursing
science, bioinformatics and computational science and
a curatorial art history track, to name but a few.
Our graduate students work with faculty to tackle
society's most demanding problems. Along the way,
students hone their research skills, and some develop
ideas that will seed new companies. Others focus on how
to best teach the next generations of scholars. Still others
prepare to inspire the world through their creative
excellence in the arts, music and writing. This newsletter
is one vehicle to share our collective progress.
The path through graduate school is often non-linear,
with students' goals and expectations changing
throughout the journey. Increasingly, doctoral students
are preparing for careers outside of academia. According
to a recent report from the Council of Graduate Schools,
about half of new doctoral degree earners are initially
employed in government, nonprofits or the private sector.
In this issue, we spotlight the exceptional faculty
mentoring you'll find at UD, and the seminal role the
faculty-student relationship plays in career development.
We also introduce you to three graduate alums who have
found success in interesting, and perhaps less common,
careers.
Regardless of the career path, we want every UD
graduate student to have effective skills in written and
oral communication, the ability to work collaboratively
in teams, and a global perspective. We are committed
to developing these attributes through a variety of
professional development activities. From the Graduate
Forum, a campus-wide day of celebration where graduate
students present their research in posters and eight-minute,
oral "flash" presentations, to dissertation boot
camps and global travel grants, UD students are taking
a holistic approach to their career preparation.
