Dear graduate coordinators,

I hope you and yours are healthy and well as we wrap up the most unusual semester we have ever lived and worked through! We made it. You did it. Thank you!

We continue to frequently update our Graduate College COVID-19 webpage, so please keep watching there for additional information and accommodations related to students, prospective students, GAs, and faculty/staff. Below are a few important updates related to our campus response to COVID-19 and its impact on the graduate community.

We know that the pandemic has created challenges for your recruitment and admission efforts. We want to continue to provide accommodations and be flexible in order to enroll a strong, regular-sized fall 2020 cohort. In fact, due to anticipated attrition, we encourage you to admit a slightly larger class than usual if you are able to do so and have quality applicants. Should the pandemic situation worsen and our plans for reopening campus for the fall semester change, we will accommodate new student roll-overs as needed.
Please note that you received the Qualtrics link to complete your Graduate Coordinator Annual Report about a week ago. We will be sending reminders, too. Please take a few minutes to complete this critical report -- it is short (shorter than ever, in fact!), but the information we are gathering is essential to our R2PC planning. Thank you!
In this time of financial crisis and need, we are getting many requests for admission application fee waivers. Unfortunately, these pay for our staff salaries; and as it is, we do not have enough state or fee funds to support our R2PC team salaries. So, we cannot offer free applications out of the Graduate College; however, as always, if you would like to provide application fee waivers to any of your prospective students, we can help you do so quite easily. You will just complete an interdepartmental requisition (IDR) form to transfer the funds to the Graduate College, and we will process the fee waiver. Questions? Please reach out to Elizabeth.Jost@unlv.edu.
Please appoint your GAs! We have an unusually high number of open GA lines for which no offers have yet been extended. It’s late in the GA appointment process, so please reach out at GradFinancialSvc@unlv.edu if we can assist in any way .
Like instructional faculty, the university will accommodate remote work for graduate assistants who are in high-risk groups for COVID-19 or live with someone in a high-risk category. The same form that deans have shared with instructional faculty to disclose their need to teach remotely in fall 2020 can be completed by teaching graduate assistants now if you already have GA teaching assignments fixed for fall; if not, there will be another process to do so later this summer for GAs. More information will follow on this. Thanks for your patience.
Due to current budget challenges, we have decided to suspend our Grad Rebel Doctoral Finishing Fellows program for at least AY20-21 in order to reallocate these funds to impact a larger number of graduate students through our Emergency Retention Grants.

As always, we are here to support you. Please feel free to reach out with questions or if we can help in any other way. Any COVID-19 issues, questions, suggestions, or concerns should be sent to me at Graduate.Dean@unlv.edu. I will be staying in touch more this summer than usual because of the current pandemic and financial crisis. It is important to me to keep you in the loop and transparently share plans, information, and decisions. Thank you for your continued support of our Grad Rebel community of scholars. I appreciate you!