Understanding professors’ expectations shouldn’t be a mystery. However, sometimes, there are disconnects between what a faculty member wants a student to produce for a project, and how the student interprets the instructions. In many cases, the expectations of faculty are clearly articulated, either in written or oral format. However, in other cases, there are situations where a faculty member’s feedback or outcomes from discussions regarding progress may not be as clear because they involve aspects of non-verbal communication such as eye contact, gestures, facial expressions, the tone of voice, and eye contact.

Addressing the Needs of Graduate Students

We draw particular attention to the needs of graduate students for our “When Faculty Say X” success seminar series. Graduate students have several forms of faculty interaction that have their own sets of nuances. For graduate students, the faculty member is a teacher, a mentor, an advisor, and a future colleague. There are several phases through which one must pass to navigate the transitions. During coursework, there is the phase where one follows the syllabus, turns in the homework, and takes the exam. During the qualifying exam and proposal stages, it can be difficult for a student to determine what they are supposed to know on the journey toward building expertise in a discipline or particular area of research. In addition to becoming a contributor to the field, a professor may have a methodology that must be employed by all in her lab or a set of theories which need to be used set the foundation for all work that comes out of the research group. There may be bibliographies that one must reference, techniques that must be mastered, and simple “unwritten rules” that must be followed. Some of the rules may include attending every group meeting and each departmental colloquium. Other rules may extend to writing, i.e., explicit use of a citation style, paragraph structure, or drafting process.  In the past, we have had in-person seminars and panels where students have a chance to post questions online, and faculty answer them in-person during a dinner seminar.

Launching #WhenFacultySayX 2017

In order to accommodate schedules of faculty guests who will join our seminar this year, and in an attempt involve all of the students in our PROMISE AGEP network and beyond, we are launching an interactive, online version of the seminar that will allow all to participate.

Here’s how it will work.

Between Friday, October 20 and Tuesday, October 31, 2017, we invite graduate students to post questions to faculty below in the comment section (you do not need a WordPress account to participate, we encourage anonymous posts.) We will encourage questions from graduate students broadly, and answers from faculty colleagues from any school.

Faculty: Faculty colleagues from around the world are welcome to share things that they want students to clearly understand, using the hashtag #WhenFacultySayX. You are also welcome to join the conversation below and reply to the comments. 

Students: This program was developed for you. It was developed to remove the barriers and fear regarding asking any and all questions related to your success. You may post anonymously.  Do you have a question that you want a faculty member to answer?

Post your questions in the comment section of this post at the bottom of this page. You may post anonymously. Our panel of experts will answer each question in the comments as well.

Our featured faculty panel of experts will answer questions that are posted on this website, below. 

PROMISE Director, Dr. Renetta Tull (@Renetta_Tull), Dr. Sarah Chard, Dr. L. Michael Hayden, Dr. Christopher Murphy, and Dr. J. Alan Yeakley.

Featured faculty:

1. Dr. Sarah Chard, Associate Professor of Anthropology at UMBC, Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Health Administration and Policy.
2. Dr. L. Michael Hayden, Chair, and Professor of Physics at UMBC, Department of Physics.
3. Dr. Christopher Murphy, Chair, and Professor of Psychology at UMBC, Department of Psychology.
4. Dr. J. Alan Yeakley, Chair, and Professor of Geography and Environmental Systems at UMBC, Department of Geography and Environmental Systems.
5. Dr. Renetta Tull – Online Moderator. Dr. RenettaTull will moderate the discussion and will add commentary based on her experience as a former faculty member at University of Wisconsin-Madison, adjunct at College Park (http://hesp.umd.edu/facultyprofile/Tull/Renetta), and member of the program faculty groups for MSRP at MIT, and QoLT at Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh.
   Tull is the University System of Maryland (12 Institutions) Director of Graduate and Professional Pipeline Development, and Special Assistant to the Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, http://www.usmd.edu/institutions/; at UMBC she is the Associate Vice Provost for Strategic Initiatives, Professor of the Practice, College of Engineering & IT.

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Historical Perspective

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The “When Faculty Say X” seminar began as a PROMISE seminar in 2003, initially titled, “Understanding Faculty Expectations” as part of the PROMISE SUCCESS 2003, a precursor to the PROMISE Summer Success Institute (SSI). During an orientation session for new graduate students at UMBC circa 2004, UMBC Psychology Professor Dr. Susan Sonnenschein posted a chart with two columns. The left column noted “What Faculty Say,” and the right column noted, “What They Mean.” PROMISE adopted this method and started the “Faculty X|Y – When Faculty Say X, They Really Mean Y” seminar to allow students to anonymously ask questions, and have a faculty panel answer the questions (grouped by topic area) in person. This seminar has drawn crowds of more than 100 graduate students. The “they really mean y” portion of the title was dropped over time.  This 2017 #WhenFacultySayX virtual seminar is the online evolution of those early panels and workshops.

Some of the programs and questions from past years can be found in these links:

When Faculty say “X” … Understanding Faculty Expectations, Unwritten Rules. Dinner Seminar, Fri. Oct. 10, 2014

“When Faculty Say ‘X’ …” Do you understand what faculty say and mean? Dinner seminar, Friday, Oct. 11, 2013

Other videos that answer questions from past years can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_uKXMv-Mty_sRI31EzJm0E0cJTX20mve

CALL FOR PAPERS - ELO 2018

Mind the Gap!

Thinking Electronic Literature in a Digital Culture:

Explorations and Interventions

• Gaps in the field
• Translation gaps: code, natural language, media
• Narrative theory, temporal gaps and the imaginative space of the in-between
• Understanding e-lit: towards digital methodologies and/or pedagogies
• Mobile technologies’ effect on writing and reading habits
• Perceptual gaps: AR, VR, and Linking Structures
• Politics of e-lit: gaps between reception communities
• Gaps and Bridges between e-lit and digital humanities
• Gender gaps in e-lit
• Spoken screens: the gap between performance and presence
• Linguistic and cultural specificities to E-lit
• Electronic literature and urban culture
• Mind the gap! E-lit and humour
• Gaps between datasets and interfaces
• Archiving differences between libraries and museums
• Exhibition differences: ephemeral and permanent installations
• What is different about e-lit for children?

• Paper (15 min - a presentation of a single paper by one or more authors - 500 word abstract).
• Lightning talk (5 min - a short paper for a focused presentation - 250 word abstract).
• Poster (1 page poster). n.b. A poster can be combined with a lightning talk.
• Panel (90 min - a proposal for a complete panel including 3 or 4 separate papers on the same general topic - 250 word overview plus 500 word individual abstracts).
• Pre-conference Workshop (Action sessions, focused on hands-on group work on a given project or topic - 500 word abstract).

• Performance and screening (10 min - readings, actions, interventions - 250 word abstract; provide links to images, videos, etc.)
• Gallery exhibit (provide description of installation, as well as technical needs)

Call for Papers:

Towson University Communication Studies Symposium: Showing Up, Making Space, and the Political Imagination of Diversity - April 27, 2018

Sara Ahmed’s 2012 On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life offers a reflexive look at the slow calcification of diversity within higher education where diversity becomes a non-performative: as long as you say you are working towards diversity you don’t have to really do anything else. Since publication, her framing of diversity and the rhetoric of tolerance is more salient than ever. At Towson University in 2015, #OccupyTowson students pushed diversity to praxis and staged a sit-in to demand action on key issues for marginalized students. Towson, along with universities across the country, are seeing students move diversity from a contained professional “institutional commitment” to a demand for real change in the lived experiences of students. Statements without action are not enough.

On the occasion of these vital conversations and movements, the 2018 Communication Studies Symposium convenes Towson University, and the surrounding Towson and Baltimore community to engage in a day-long event which confronts themes of diversity, inclusion, and social justice. The symposium aims to engage and mobilize these themes within the context of action and praxis. What does it mean to embody social justice praxis? Are some embodiments burdens? What challenges does “diversity work” face? Does diversity lose its activist roots when institutionalized? How do our bodies respond to institutional exclusions? What does the labor of inclusion look like? Who ought to show up? Shut up? Where do praxis and identity intersect? What are the contours of intersectional social justice?

The Communication Studies major at Towson University invites faculty, students, activists, and community members to join us for a day of productive difficult dialogues at the intersection of identity- formation, embodiment, and social justice. Through foregrounding the activist work of scholar Dr. Amber Johnson (the symposium’s keynote address), the symposium aims to ignite discussions about our socially unjust world in which “we experience moments that require small and large acts of repair.” Part of that repair process is showing up, making space, and engaging in wound and wonder alike.

We invite you to show up and make space with paper presentations, performances, and creative work during morning and afternoon break-out sessions. The symposium seeks active dialogue from participants within the context of (but not limited to) the following points of departure:

• Postracial rhetoric and racism
• (Trans)gender/Racial/Sexual Justice
• Rhetorics of toleranceMicro/Macro aggressions and institutional life
• Political coalition-building and collaboration
• The problem(s) of diversity
• Invisible power of whiteness
• Art activism and identity
• Embodiment, affect, and agency
  

Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words to CommStudiesSymposium@towson.edu . Be sure to include your name, title, and affiliation. Feel free to email with questions. Deadline: Jan 1, 2018.
 

The UMBC Graduate School Dissertation Fellowship

Application Deadline:  Friday, October 27, 2017

• be in good academic standing;
• provide a letter of support from the Chair of the Dissertation Committee that

• provide, if employed outside the university, written evidence from the student’s employer indicating the employer’s willingness to reduce job time and duties in order for the student to participate in the Fellowship;
• submit a dissertation abstract of no more than two pages in length; and
• submit a 1-2 page management plan signed by the Chair of the Dissertation Committee describing the status of the dissertation work, the steps required to complete the work, and the feasible time line for completion.
• Identify, if a prior recipient of a Dissertation Fellowship, the prior term (e.g., Spring 2017) in which the Fellowship was received.