A goal to create connections throughout the UW Graduate Student Community has evolved into a network which organizes events for department graduate students to provide academic support as well as socialization opportunities.
The Recognized Student Organization for all graduate students at UW was founded as a discussion club for science majors, and expanded to the Graduate Student Network. GSN is aimed to connect graduates on campus and provide them resources necessary for their studies.
Every month GSN organizes write-in retreats, coffee hours and workshops, giving graduate students a chance to explore campus outside their department, meet other people, develop new skills and get assistance when needed.
“Something we are thinking about a lot is collaborating graduate students from different departments for their dissertations, or scientific projects, and all other things they are interested in,” Vice President of GSN, Lisa Barrett, said. “We want to give them a chance to make connections with people outside of the discipline, which is a really big thing in our days to be successful in the academia, So, we are thinking about events, we all could benefit from, such as workshops for the development of professional skills.”
GSN was founded three years ago, and started as a discussion group. In few years it expanded to the campus-wide RSO, which organizes events for graduate students every month and receives funding from the university.
“We started three years ago. Most of the founders were science majors, who started having discussions and then realized that they are missing all these other perspectives. So, they wanted to try get more students from other disciplines.” Rachel Edie, the president of GSN, said.
This year Graduate Students Network is organizing different types of social and academic events.
“We are trying to have our coffee hours at the different places on campus. We want to get people to explore UW, because as a graduate student you could stay only within your department, and that’s the only place,” Edie said. “We do them at the geology museum, in the conservatory. Also, we organize social hours in the Gardens in the Union, and conduct them at least once a month.”
GSN is aimed to help graduate students in their academic life, too. To do this the RSO, with the support of Writing Center, sets write-in retreats for graduate students twice a month.
“One of the major parts of the graduate student’s life is writing. We have to write our project proposals, thesis and papers for publications. This writing takes us a large amount of time. That’s hard to motivate for, because there are no deadlines,” Edie said. “So, people have really hard times structuring their lives around that. Our writing retreats are held towards helping people get started, and giving them and resources on campus to move forward and get things done quickly.”
The write-in retreats are found to be useful for students and are visited by many graduates every single meeting scheduled.
“We also have writing retreats, where we have a big attendance. There we are providing free food, and academic help to people. So, there are usually about 50 people,” Barrett said.
Also, GSN organizes at least two workshops a month. They have different topics and are aimed to provide UW graduate students with resources on campus, necessary for success through their master’s program.
“For example, we had a wellness workshop,” Edie said. “We brought people to a counseling center and the Wellness Center. It was done to give students tips on how to deal with stress, to let them know what resources are available on campus, what to do if they are feeling depressed, or have hard times with your adviser.”
GSN looks forward to continued expansion of their networks creating more opportunity for each graduate study discipline to collaborate. This also gives them more opportunities for academic, personal and professional development.
