Earlier this year, at a meeting with the DGPs, I announced a new initiative in my office to improve the way we publicize research assistantship openings in the College.
The reason for this initiative is straightforward: the College, like all colleges, is being asked to support more graduate students, and our faculty, who have become more successful at winning external grant funding, need to be able to recruit graduate students quickly after learning that their projects are funded.
In many cases, a department's grad students may be entirely committed for a year, working on other projects. Or, in some cases, interdisciplinary work requires skills that don't exist in a researcher's own department, but that might be found among grad students in another department. Faculty often tell me that finding the talent for their research projects is difficult. I hope that this initiative makes finding such talent more efficient.
The CV bank (simply, a folder with grad student CVs maintained in Google Drive) and a job posting listserv, are intended to bring together students look for research positions with faculty offering such positions. Any sort of position may be announced, ranging from occasional hourly work (of the sort funded by small internal grants like FRPDs or SRAs), to fully funded GSSP positions funded through external grants. I suspect that most positions will look like the former, as the latter type of positions will be filled by students that you and your colleagues are mentoring in your department, or in established interdisciplinary efforts.
This is a first step, and a work in progress, and I welcome any ideas that would make this effort work better for your colleagues. Let me know how I can help in any way to improve upon this initiative to make it work for you.
Best,
Tom
