Dear Graduate Coordinators, Program Directors, and Financial Processors,
I hope that everyone has had a productive and successful first month of the semester! As we look ahead, I would like to share some important updates for the fall.
Graduate School Policies and Procedures Manual
The 2024-2025 Graduate School Policies and Procedures Manual has been updated for easier reading and includes a new Chapter Nine, Graduate Assistantships, which accommodates the WSU/UAW Contract for Academic Student Employees.
Both the graduate program bylaw guidance and handbook guidance also have been updated due to the WSU/UAW Contract. The bylaw guidance covers graduate program participation, whereas the handbook guidance now clearly separates academic from employment concerns. The handbook guidance also includes an Independent Study, Research, and Special Projects Credit Expectations template that may be customized to meet program needs. The goal is to ensure that expectations and criteria for satisfactory performance in 700, 701, 702, and 800 courses are clearly defined and measurable.
- Bylaw Guidance
- Handbook Guidance (includes link to the academic expectations template)
New SmartSheet Processes
Following the Office of the Registrar’s lead, we have adopted SmartSheets for several processes, replacing previous fillable PDFs where available. We are grateful to Assistant Registrar Jill Freuden for her valuable guidance in implementing this change, which assists students in completing forms more efficiently. We also are currently building out the routing process so that the SmartSheets can be used to collect signatures before the form is submitted in the GRM. See our updated Forms page on the Graduate School website. We will continue to update forms and routing as we are able, and we encourage all students to use the most updated form on our Forms page when creating a GRM submission.
Theses and Dissertation Guidance Updates
We have also updated our Dissertation and Thesis Submission and Formatting Guidelines. We would like to thank professors Judi McDonald, Michael Forbes, and Matt Hudelson for helping with this process. The new guidelines accommodate modern tools such as Overleaf/LaTeX and updated ProQuest requirements while offering basic formatting guidelines for the main body of the work. We emphasize flexibility in formatting as long as consistency is maintained. We emphasize that the student’s advisory committee is responsible for approving the content and all aspects of the final thesis or dissertation.
Graduate Applications
Our GradCAS and EngineeringCAS applications for the next admission cycle (summer 2025, fall 2025, and spring 2026) went live on September 1, 2024. Please link to our Apply page on your program websites. If you prefer to link directly to GradCAS and EngineeringCAS, please let us know so we can provide “deep links” that filter all but WSU programs. We would like to thank graduate program coordinators and directors who helped ensure accurate application information.
Recurring Help Sessions
Starting in October 2024, we will initiate online (Zoom) help sessions to cover finances, admissions, programs, graduations, and assessments. These sessions will be communicated via email announcements as typical and will now also be displayed on our new Graduate School Help Sessions Calendar with Zoom links. The calendar is on our website under Faculty & Staff Resources, allowing “one stop shopping” for your training needs. You can use the Zoom Help Session Topic Request found on the same page to make specific requests to the Graduate School for trainings or updates.
Graduate and Professional Student Data
Self-service dashboards continue to be expanded and are listed at Graduate and Professional Students Analytics on the Graduate School website. All dashboards require a WSU login with the specified user access. Updated dashboards include:
- Program Admissions and Milestones (returns admission status, prelim status, and campus location)
- Graduate Students with Instructor Roles (graduate students assigned instructional roles in myWSU Maintain Schedule of Classes)
- Active Student Details (all current students and students on leave, with email address), and
- Survey of Earned Doctorates (WSU’s data from an annual census of all individuals receiving a research doctorate from an accredited U.S. institution)
If you have any questions about these announcements or if there is anything else that we can do for you at this time, please let us know. Thank you for all you do for graduate education!
Sincerely,
Tammy
9/20/2024