A Professional Development Program For Graduate Students At North Carolina State University
- Conference
- Location
-
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
- Publication Date
-
June 22, 2008
- Start Date
-
June 22, 2008
- End Date
-
June 25, 2008
- ISSN
-
2153-5965
- Conference Session
- Tagged Division
-
Graduate Studies
- Page Count
-
11
- Page Numbers
-
13.87.1 - 13.87.11
- DOI
-
10.18260/1-2--3643
- Permanent URL
-
https://peer.asee.org/3643
- Download Count
-
418
Paper Authors
Rebecca Brent Education Designs Inc.
REBECCA BRENT, Ed.D., is President of Education Designs, Inc., a consulting firm in Cary, North Carolina. Her professional interests include faculty development in the sciences and engineering, support programs for new faculty members, preparation of alternative licensure teachers, and applications of technology in the K-12 classroom. She was formerly a professor of education at East Carolina University. She is co-director of the ASEE National Effective Teaching Institute.
Richard Felder North Carolina State University
RICHARD M. FELDER, Ph.D., is Hoechst Celanese Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering at North Carolina State University. He is co-author of Elementary Principles of Chemical Processes (3rd Edn., Wiley, 2005), widely used as the text for the introductory chemical engineering course; author or co-author of over 200 papers on engineering education and chemical process engineering; a Fellow Member of the ASEE; and co-director of the ASEE National Effective Teaching Institute. Many of his papers and columns on education-related topics may be viewed at
.
Abstract
NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract
A Professional Development Program for Graduate Students at North Carolina State University
I. Introduction
The traditional engineering graduate school experience involves taking courses, selecting a dissertation or thesis advisor and project, performing the research under the advisor’s supervision, and completing and defending the dissertation. Such an experience trains graduate students to carry out research on a problem someone else has defined and gotten funded. It does not, however, prepare them for anything else they might be called upon to do in graduate school and in their professional careers, including:
• Teaching assistant responsibilities. Grade assignments, projects, and tests; supervise laboratories; work with students in office hours; teach recitations and cover classes for faculty members.
• Getting a job after graduation. Choose between an academic and non-academic career; prepare a resume (or dossier or professional portfolio); prepare for a job interview. The need for such preparation is particularly acute for students who wish to pursue an academic career.
• Getting a faculty career off to a good start. Define research projects, write successful proposals to fund them, attract graduate students to work on them, plan new courses, teach them effectively, manage the time demands imposed by research, teaching, and personal life, and integrate into the local campus culture. Some universities provide guidance on these tasks to new faculty members, but most do not.
All academic programs of the 16-campus University of North Carolina system that use graduate teaching assistants are required to provide the TAs with preliminary training. For many years, the North Carolina State University (NCSU) College of Engineering met this requirement by sending its new TAs to a day-long campus-wide workshop. Many of the graduate students complained that the workshop was too general to be of much value—their perception was that the things they needed to know to be TAs in engineering were different from what TAs in humanities and social science and business and management courses needed.
Ronkowski1 presents a number of strong arguments supporting that perception. She notes that the structure of knowledge and appropriate strategies for conveying that knowledge vary considerably from one discipline to another, and suggests that development programs for graduate students (and faculty) are best presented in a disciplinary context. A number of engineering schools have published descriptions of their graduate student training programs. The program topics fall into two somewhat overlapping categories: (1) common TA responsibilities, such as grading and assisting in laboratories2 and (2) teaching.2–10
The most effective discipline-specific TA training program we know of is one that has been conducted for many years in the College of Engineering at Cornell University.2 Training is
Brent, R., & Felder, R. (2008, June), A Professional Development Program For Graduate Students At North Carolina State University Paper presented at 2008 Annual Conference & Exposition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 10.18260/1-2--3643
ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2008 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015