The Graduate School won a national award accompanied with $20,000 to implement five proposed programs to strengthen the quality of graduate study at Eastern.

The “Educational Testing Service/Council of Graduate Schools Award for Innovation in Promoting Success in Graduate Education: From Admission through Completion” was accepted by Robert Augustine, the dean of the Graduate School, on Dec. 9 at the 51st annual meeting of the Council of Graduate Schools.

The school also received a regional award that led to the national award.

President Bill Perry said the national award is recognition of the high quality thinking in the Graduate School.

“I think it shows that the Graduate School with faculty, programs and administrative leadership have good ideas and they know how to implement those ideas,” Perry said. “It makes our programs stronger and more attractive to graduate students applying here for study.”

The first program is to better inform Eastern sophomores about how to prepare for future graduate study.

“There are certain activities that students should add to their curriculum if they plan to pursue a graduate degree,” Augustine said. “One of them is to do an undergraduate research project, which really paves the way to graduate study, and another one would be to get involved with a faculty member by doing some sort of creative activity or research.”

A video that will be available on the Eastern website will be made providing a list of activities students can engage in as a sophomore, he said.

The second program is to work to strengthen key partnerships with external universities where many graduate students come from.

Augustine said the partnerships include universities in and outside of Illinois such as the University of Illinois, Illinois State University, Northern Illinois University, Indiana State University and Indiana University in Bloomington.

“We will be working more diligently to create some outreach programs that would ensure that students from those institutions learn about opportunities for graduate study at Eastern and to ensure that they apply here because we have had really good success from students from those institutions,” Augustine said.

The third program is to work with local Eastern offices to provide specialized support services for first-year graduate studies students.

Augustine said the first year of graduate study is the hardest.

“It is the year that we typically loose graduate students because they can have unique challenges like having children, getting married and working full time,” he said.

The fourth program is to provide graduate students with information about what they should be doing if they choose to pursue a doctoral degree including engaging in graduate-level projects and working with faculty.

“It is also very helpful for graduate students to understand how to get funded to get a Ph.D.,” Augustine said. “We want them to know how to be competitive for funds because it may take four or five years and it is important for them to know how to support themselves.”

The last program to be launched is to implement a scholarly summer program for high-performing students who are looking for an opportunity to do more research.

It will take two years to create these programs and the $20,000 will be used to fund several graduate assistantships to help with the Graduate Studies Institute.

The programs comprise the Integrative Graduate Studies Institute, which was developed after a yearlong study of the Graduate School by the Enrollment Quality and Diversity Board.

“The committee led a year-long study of the graduate community here to try to understand why some programs were successful with efforts for recruiting and retaining high quality and diverse graduate students and if there was a way for us to share or use those success stories more broadly with the whole university,” Augustine said.

The Graduate School won the Midwestern Association of Graduate Schools Regional Award in April from initiating a project called First Choice Graduate Programs developed about five years ago, which was a process to help strengthen the quality of graduate study at Eastern, Augustine said.

Rachel Rodgers can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].