Sara Dolan and Joe Taube

Transcript

Derek Smith:
Hello and welcome to Baylor Connections, a conversation series with the people shaping our future. Each week we go in depth with Baylor leaders, professors, and more discussing important topics in higher education, research and student life. Today we are talking about the role and impact of graduate students.
Baylor University is celebrating the nearly 5,500 graduate students who pursue post-graduate degrees at the university over Graduate Student Appreciation Week running this year, April 1st through the fifth, and we are visiting with two faculty members today who can share some fun perspectives on the role of graduate students at Baylor.
Sara Dolan serves as associate dean for professional development in the graduate school and is a long-time psychology professor and researcher. Joe Taube is a Baylor graduate and serves as associate professor of biology and graduate program director for the Department of Biology. As the university celebrates Graduate Student Appreciation Week, they're going to share with us how graduate students impact teaching research and scholarship and [inaudible 00:01:01] their impact long after their last class at Baylor.
Well, Joe, Sara, it's great to have you with us today. Thanks for joining us on the program.

Joe Taube:
Yeah, it's my pleasure. Thank you.

Sara Dolan:
Thanks for having us.

Derek Smith:
Well, let's start off with a little bit, maybe a thesis statement, if you will, feels appropriate for the next 23 minutes or so. So Sara, I'll start with you. If you're on an elevator with an alum and they wanted to know more about how graduate students enhance the university, why we're investing in that, how would you respond?

Sara Dolan:
Well, graduate students are really the engines of a research institution and they do all sorts of things from not just their own studies, but they're also teaching our undergraduates. They're providing research services to their graduate school mentors and they're providing this kind of intellectual vibrancy on campus.

Joe Taube:
Yeah, I was going to use the metaphor of the lifeblood, being in the biology department, of our university. Their teaching role is really important because they are much more hands-on with our undergraduate students, they usually serve as teaching assistants in our labs, and so they get to work very closely with undergrads. In the research lab I don't think anything would really happen without our graduate students. They're the ones who end up driving the bus on all these projects and they do great work and support that. But most of all, they're really here to develop their own academic careers and it's a joy to get to work with them on that and see them become the next generation of scientists.

Derek Smith:
Yeah, they're in the shoes that you were in just a few short years ago and now you get to work with them.

Joe Taube:
Absolutely. Yeah.

Derek Smith:
Sara, let's talk about Graduate Student Appreciation Week for just a moment. It's an annual event the universities across the nation celebrate. Why is it important to you and your colleagues to celebrate that here at Baylor?

Sara Dolan:
Well, first let me give a bit of a history. So in 1993, the National Association of Graduate and Professional Studies decided to honor graduate students the first week of April for their contribution, their impact, and their value to their institutions. And here grad students make up about a quarter of our total student population, and like I said before, they're the engines of our research. They teach our undergraduates in a way, like Joe said, they're much more hands-on and accessible than some of our faculty. And they increase our impact by representing us across the world in all sorts of professions after they graduate.
And it's important for us to honor the work that they do because being a grad student is tough work. Joe can attest to this, certainly, I can attest to it. Graduate students are studying, they're providing research and teaching services to the university for at least 20 hours a week, and they're also making progress on their own research while they're trying to balance the real-life stuff that happens to people at this stage of life. So our grad students have really flown under the Baylor radar for quite some time, and recently we've started to acknowledge, especially with R1, the contributions that graduate students make here to Baylor. And it's just important for us to acknowledge that they're a major part of our community.

Derek Smith:
Yeah. You mentioned R1, we don't get there without them, and it's a tangible sign that maybe not as many people know about.

Sara Dolan:
Yeah, absolutely. There are kind of two ways that graduate students have impacted R1 attainment. So one is the number of graduate students who earn PhD.s at Baylor. The R1 category means that you've got above a certain above threshold of doctoral graduates, and we've been intentionally planning for that for a number of years. We actually achieved that earlier than we anticipated.
The other way that graduate students impact R1 metrics is in research productivity. So like Joe said, because our graduate students are doing so much research in the labs that's supporting their faculty, faculty are getting more grants, they're writing more papers, and then that allows us to have more graduate students to do even more work. And it's kind of this cyclical relationship, the better and greater number of graduate students we have the more research the university can produce.

Joe Taube:
And I want to pick up on one thing Sara mentioned. The number of graduate students has increased, and that's been fantastic, but it's really not just an additive effect there. The fact that we are able to reach these critical thresholds in many of our graduate programs has meant that they have much more synergy with each other. They're interacting to a much stronger degree, and they're sharpening each other's skills. And getting to that level has really changed the game in our graduate program.

Derek Smith:
Visiting with Sara Dolan and Joe Taube here on Baylor Connections. And Joe, I want to ask you, you can paint a picture for us of their impact. I've heard some of your colleagues talk about a lab almost as a small business in a way as you receive grants and are productive. So let's go inside this a little bit, but I want to ask you first, tell me about the research that you do. If someone said, "Hey, what's your area of focus in the faculty center?" What would you tell them?

Joe Taube:
Yeah, so my research is focused on cell plasticity and cancer. This is important to understand and interfere with because it's really enabling two of the great drivers of mortality in cancer that is metastasis and chemotherapy resistance. And my graduate students develop projects within that umbrella. The first couple years we worked together to find a gap in the knowledge, something that's really critical to understand and something that we have the skill set and the tools to understand. And then as they do that, they develop hypotheses. We figure out which ones have some traction, which ones maybe don't. And then after a couple of years, they're off to the races. It's time for them to really generate the data, understand the data, critically analyze their data, turn it into papers, and that, like you said, it fuels the next cycle. Getting the papers out impacts our grant scores and allows us to build up our program.

Derek Smith:
So you've got this area of focus as you are trying to address a massive problem. It impacts everyone, cancer. You're also teaching students, you're also helping your graduate students reach their own professional goals with excellence and develop them. So kind of a unique setup. Take us inside, if you would, what that looks like in the day-to-day life of your lab.

Joe Taube:
Oh, sure. Yeah. That can be a very difficult transition, especially in the first year. If they're coming from an undergraduate program, they're going from a mindset of I need to do well in these courses and that's my measure of success. We asked them to continue learning in courses while at the same time taking on a new type of problem set, that is what are the unknowns that I can try to discover? It's not so much about learning what's out there, it's about learning what's not out there yet. And that's a very difficult transition. And like Sara mentioned, this is a very critical time in their own career and personal life. Being young, being in your twenties brings with it a lot of stressors, and it's important for us as leaders and as faculty to understand that entire picture that they're experiencing.

Derek Smith:
How do they fuel what goes on in your lab? If you use that small business analogy and maybe you're the head of your own business, what does it look like working with them to do the things you need to do?

Joe Taube:
Sure. Well, I like to establish each of them as somewhat independent project leaders. In fact, they'll bring on undergraduate students and help to train them to work together on some of these projects. But we consult every week, have weekly meetings where we go over their current data, what needs to be improved, what can happen next? And we also each bounce ideas together. If I was the only one seeking out the right ideas for these projects, it would be a failure really quickly. And so I try to push that onto them when they're ready to take ownership.

Derek Smith:
When you think about what's required of them to navigate these roles, what's required of a successful graduate student, and then what does that require of you as a mentor?

Joe Taube:
Yes. So I think it really requires the development of that kind of self-confidence. Being able to understand that your progress is going to come in very small increments and is not necessarily going to be marked in the same way that it used to be as an undergraduate student. This is very difficult work. It wouldn't be a PhD if it weren't. And so marking those achievements for things that have not worked for other people, figuring out lots of problems, troubleshooting, that is the work often of a PhD. There's certainly a large amount of endurance to it. And so switching your mindset over from that regular reinforcement of test grades and so on to seeing progress when maybe it's harder to see, that's a really critical thing.

Derek Smith:
And Sara, I mentioned that you taught for a long time in the psychology department and now your role as associate dean for professional development in the grad school. What do you do in that role and why was that appealing to you?

Sara Dolan:
Yeah, first I want to say everyone in the graduate school helps graduate students. So we have a whole team that helps recruit and admit the best students in the country. We have a team that helps students with their graduation paperwork, and my team gets to work with students right in the middle of that timeline. And our job is student success. So we facilitate that in lots of ways. Some ways are directly with students. We offer lots of workshops, we call them graduate pathways to success or GPS workshops. And those can range on topics from wellness and mental health, which is not a surprise for a psychologist, all the way to how to write an academic paper, how to apply for a job, whether it's an academic job or an industry job, and kind of everything in between.
We also work directly with faculty and with graduate program directors like Joe. And our job there is to help faculty and programs be the most successful that they can be. So we help them with things like curriculum development, kind of keeping on top of the national trends, working with them to make sure that their programs are meeting kind of the highest quality of disciplinary standards for training graduate students. And an initiative that I've been working on this year that is pretty exciting is on mentoring. So one of the things we get to do in the graduate school is help faculty be the very best mentors that they can be. We know that relationship between a graduate student and their dissertation advisor especially, but really any faculty mentor, is the most important relationship that they're going to have academically until their career launches. So we want our faculty to be just outstanding, caring and intellectually rigorous mentors.

Derek Smith:
This is Baylor Connections. We are discussing Graduate Student Appreciation Week with Sara Dolan, associate dean for professional development in the graduate school, and Joe Taube, associate professor of biology and graduate program director for the Department of Biology. And Sara, you mentioned that it's faculty across campus, leaders across campus, all playing a role in sharpening and developing graduate education, steady upward trajectory. R1 was a tangible sign of that, but that's really been an area of focus and investment. Very broad question, but the teamwork that's brought it to this point is continuing to elevate that. How would you describe that?

Sara Dolan:
Well, it's an effort that everyone across the university has to contribute to. So even people who I think may not understand their contribution to graduate education, people like perhaps in the Office of Student Life or the Office of Spiritual Life, people who are office managers or budget officers in different departments and colleges, everyone contributes to this and we really can't be a high quality cutting-edge research university without everyone investing in that.

Derek Smith:
It's very competitive, as an R1 institution, we're competing for great students against a lot of other great schools. And Joe, Sara mentioned working with graduate program directors like yourself. From the faculty side of that, what does that look like to you getting to work with the graduate school?

Joe Taube:
Well, the graduate school is such a great partner. They've helped us expand our biology graduate program and also really enhance it. We've gone from around 30 graduate students about seven years ago to getting close to a hundred, which is an incredible commitment from the university and a great thing for our faculty. We get great support on specific needs. I really do feel like this is a partnership in terms of communication, and we also get really effective prodding at times when we need to up our game and that's really been evident in this past year with the mentorship program. Getting a bunch of faculty together to talk about mentorship very specifically has really been helpful not just to hear Sara's wisdom, but really to discuss amongst ourselves some best practices that are happening across the university. And that's going to be a great thing going forward.

Derek Smith:
You're mentoring students who are a few years older than undergraduate students, in a way they're also playing a mentorship role whether they think about it or not. And I want to ask you, I'm curious. So I was a graduate student at Baylor and I was a teaching assistant in the Department of Communication, and I remember I was telling someone about that and they made an offhand comment along the line of, "Oh, so the professor wanted a break, huh?" And I remember that. I remember that and I explained more about what I did. But I'm curious, tell us a little bit about why it's so important that graduate students are teaching in the class to your undergrads. I mean, not that you aren't, but they play a role in that.

Joe Taube:
Absolutely. In the biology department we have our faculty in the lecture classrooms delivering the content in that way, but we also have our graduate students serving in two ways. We have them in the laboratory classrooms, and that requires a lot of hands-on work. They get to teach some of those skills that might help undergraduate students get into research labs and develop their own curiosity. All of us who are interested in research, started as undergrads who started to pick up on that idea. And so they can serve as mentors in that way.
We also are starting to get some of our graduate students to support our teaching through recitations and that means taking a lecture class and meeting with just a small portion of those students on a weekly basis. This is where maybe the class is large and undergraduate students don't have a chance to ask questions, well now they're in a smaller group, they're going to be much more forthcoming. And also sometimes the professors can be intimidating. And having that graduate student who's much closer to their age and also learned the material more recently to talk with makes a big difference for some critical student outcomes.

Sara Dolan:
And I think it also sharpens our graduate students' ability to communicate about research. So you don't really know something well until you know can teach it so it's important for their own education to be able to teach. And then to be able to communicate their own work, not just what's in the classroom or in the textbook, but the work that they do really sharpens their scientific communication skills.

Derek Smith:
I'd like to ask this question to both of you. Sara, I'll start with you. And how much is that as we're talking about this, are we really thinking about their impact and Baylor's impact in a way long after they're gone from here? I know, Joe, you came back to work to Baylor, but you could have taken what you learned at Baylor and in your other degrees anywhere, but you came back here and Sara, you came here as well. How does this broaden Baylor's impact as they go forward?

Sara Dolan:
Yeah, I think that's a really critical thing to keep in mind. We're training people to be scholars to impact their field of research, to impact the places that they go, and to use a kind of Baylor phrase to fling their green and gold afar to really show that they're Baylor Bears and Baylor's a place that matters and does really high impact work.

Joe Taube:
Yeah, great leaders leverage the strengths of the people that are working together with them. And to me, if graduate students are given the right kind of responsibility to help do some mentorship themselves, then that's going to give them that practice going forward in their own career. We as faculty, we don't always necessarily get trained in mentorship, and yet we're expected to do that well. So being able to give them some opportunities is important.

Derek Smith:
Visiting with Joe Taube and Sara Dolan here on Baylor Connections. Sara, I want to ask you a little bit about a couple other areas of graduate education here at Baylor we haven't discussed yet. First is graduate student Association. They do a lot to work with and advocate for our graduate students. Who are they and what does it mean to you to get to work with them?

Sara Dolan:
Yeah. We are so blessed at Baylor to have a graduate students association or GSA that works in partnership with us at a lot of places. There's an adversarial relationship between the GSA and the administration, but here we work in very close partnership. So we've got a leadership team of graduate students from really across the university who do things like advocacy, who plan social events to build community for students across different departments. And then each department has a GSA representative, and once a month they come together and they discuss issues of importance to graduate students.
And it's been really a joy to work with these students. First of all, they're really smart and really ambitious and highly motivated and really caring of the community that they're building. And that's really, really neat to see. But also because we are in such close partnership with them and we have such a strong positive relationship with them, we're able to get a lot of things done. And just one example of that is that graduate students for the first time ever, are getting a discounted meal plan for the dining halls, and that was the result of GSA doing some advocacy, pulling together data and talking to the right people about their needs.

Derek Smith:
Well, that's big. Those discounts are always big. And not only that, I was thinking a lot of grad students are in a spot in life it's a little different from undergrad too, everyone enjoys a discount, but some of them are married, have kids. That can go a long way.

Sara Dolan:
Absolutely. And it's difficult for graduate students to get out of the lab to go eat a meal. So to be able to eat on campus for a reasonable amount of money is hopefully going to be a game-changer for some of our students.

Derek Smith:
I want to ask you too, Sara, about another population that I think is probably deserving of its own show here at some point, our growing online and professional students. Could you give us just a little snapshot of that?

Sara Dolan:
Sure. There are now about three thousand online and professional students. They're in hybrid programs, so they have courses that are online, and then they also come to campus for a few days here and a few days there a couple of times each year of their program. They're mostly in professional kinds of programs, so physical therapy, occupational therapy, nursing practitioner programs. So they're training to be scholars in their particular health profession.
And they're a little bit older than our on-campus students. They're about 34 years old on average and our on-campus are about 28. Actually, there is a large underrepresented minority and female population of online and professional students. So we've got lots of opportunities to work with students there. And they're a vibrant group of students. When I've been able to meet with them, it's been really inspiring to see how much they love Baylor. They're not just going to a program that is online that offers the thing they're interested in, they love Baylor,

Derek Smith:
Baylor Bears through and through no matter where they are in the country. Well, as we wind down, I want to ask you both to conclude this is Graduate Student Appreciation Week that we're celebrating. So Sara, I'll start with you. What would you like to say in closing to show your appreciation for our graduate students?

Sara Dolan:
Well, the graduate students are kind of the heart of the university at this point. As we're on our research mission and we're elevating our research productivity and our impact and our scholarship, graduate students are the ones who are helping us to do that. And we really do thank them. We enjoy working with them, and we recognize the contributions that they're making in the classroom, in their own scholarship and with our scholarship as faculty,

Joe Taube:
In graduate school the aim is to discover the edge of what is presently known. This can be a very uncomfortable but exciting time, and it's very exciting as faculty members to go on that journey with them and to help them realize they're capable of pushing those boundaries and they belong in the realm of scientists.

Derek Smith:
Well, it's exciting to hear about this and excited to think about what they're doing and will continue to do at Baylor and beyond. Well, Joe, Sara, thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate you joining us and taking the time to share.

Joe Taube:
Thank you.

Sara Dolan:
Thanks for having us.

Derek Smith:
Graduate Student Appreciation Week runs April 1st through fifth, and we got a visit with our guest today. Sara Dolan, associate dean for professional development in a graduate school and Joe Taube, associate professor of biology and graduate program director for the Department of Biology.
This has been Baylor Connections. I'm Derek Smith. A reminder, you can hear this in other programs online at connections.web.baylor.edu. You can subscribe to the program on iTunes. Thanks for joining us here on Baylor Connections.