GRAD REBEL MENTOR April 2021

A Message from Dean Kate Korgan Hello graduate faculty, Well, we’re more than a month past the one-year anniversary of our COVID-induced shift to remote work and education. Today, with vaccinations available for all, both spring and hope are in the air. We at the Graduate College have our eyes set on a healthier and safer year ahead. To that end, we are busy planning for post-pandemic pivots to ensure that we rise out of the pains of the last year a stronger, better, more innovative, flexible, and just graduate community. As we continue to chart still somewhat uncertain territory, at the Graduate College we are committed to being ever more transparent, inclusive, and responsive to campus needs while supporting our Top Tier goals. One of our key post-pandemic pivots is to deliver all of our services to our various constituent groups via multiple modalities: in-person and onsite services, meetings, and events in the Gateway Building, while also providing remote and virtual options for all of our services. We believe that students, faculty, and staff have come to expect this flexibility and we are determined to deliver it. To that end, we have several exciting projects to share with you: Graduate College Handbooks: We have recently published or updated five handbooks to provide members of the UNLV community with access to the information they need to be successful. We hope that the following handbooks will help answer questions you or your students may have and provide guidance on topics that you encounter as you navigate your role as a graduate faculty member. Graduate Faculty Handbook Graduate Assistant Handbook Graduate Student Handbook Postdoctoral Scholar Handbook Interdisciplinary Graduate Programs Handbook Graduate College Strategic Plan: As you may know, our team has been putting together a five-year strategic plan to align us with the university’s Top Tier goals, focus on our own internal goals, and create a roadmap that sets us up as a university to deliver the best graduate education possible to our students. We are in the final stages of polishing the strategic plan and its executive summary and will share those pieces with campus soon. We’re creating a Strategic Plan website for transparency and accountability. We will track our progress on our plan through annual reports and key metrics that will be available on the same webpage. Please watch for more information coming soon. Knowledge Center and Chat: In an effort to answer questions the graduate community may have more quickly and efficiently, our team is hard at work setting up two new tools. The Knowledge Center is an online, searchable hub of information. Prospective students, current students, graduate faculty, graduate students, alumni, and community members will be able to browse, search for, and filter answers to frequently asked questions. Chat will be an online chat function that will allow members of the graduate community to chat directly with members of our Graduate College team about the questions they may have. The Knowledge Center is now available in the Grad Rebel Gateway student portal. Both the Knowledge Center and Chat will be available on our website in the coming week. Text Messaging: Our team has also been hard at work to establish our ability to text message graduate students. We know that not all students read emails or newsletters or follow us on social media, so it’s important for us to establish another communication channel -- one that we know they are partial to -- to ensure we can communicate relevant, timely, and important information with students who opt in to receive our text messages. We hope to begin text messaging students in the coming months and will keep you updated. Our goal with all of these efforts is to create greater transparency and accessibility and make it easier for the members of our community to accomplish their goals with ease and efficiency. I welcome your feedback on other ways we might be able to meet this goal. Happy spring and warm wishes for a good end of semester!   Kate Korgan, Ph.D. Dean, UNLV Graduate College