Growing Together
In the past three years, nearly 10,000 graduate students have attended Graduate Center programming. Working with our team, they found career support, writing advice, funding opportunities, and mentoring and wellness resources— all at no charge. But despite the thousands of participants in our programs, the most common response I get when I tell people about the Graduate Center is, “That exists?” delivered in a tone that’s both excited and irritated—excited to find a resource center designed to help students navigate graduate school and irritated that said deliverer didn’t know about it before. So we thought we’d take a minute to explain just what the Graduate Center does, and how we’ve helped thousands of students on campus and hope to help more.
The Graduate Center was founded in 2014, thanks to the vision of then-Dean Andrew Carnie. That year, the total attendance for all of our programs was about 600 students. These days, our annual program attendance is closer to 3,000, but our goal is to be top of mind when every student thinks, “Where can I learn to write a grant proposal, or present my research, or write my dissertation?” These and other skills that we help you develop are increasingly necessary in and beyond graduate school.
“More jobs are requiring soft skills such as presentations, outreach, and mentoring,” says Sylvia Anderson, Graduate Coordinator for the UArizona Mathematics Program. “Programs like those the Graduate Center runs are extremely helpful for students, especially students who are going to be graduating soon.”
And even if you don’t see a program that appeals to you immediately, you might be able to avail yourself of a program we’ve helped to create. The Graduate Center has collaborated with many departments on campus to design professional development opportunities tailored to students in specific disciplines. One notable example is the FAR program that Dr. Shelley Hawthorne Smith, Director of the Graduate Writing Lab, developed in collaboration with the UArizona Cancer Center to help students apply for F-Awards. So if you don’t see something that pertains to your exact interest on our website, consider reaching out anyway. We may be able to direct you to a program that doesn’t formally fall under our services but that we’ve helped create.
This article started with numbers—increases in attendance, visibility, and involvement. And that’s great. It shows that we’re doing our job. But really, and in the absolute most unabashedly sappy way, the only reason higher numbers are important is that they indicate more graduate students are achieving their goals and discovering the second thing the Graduate Center is dedicated to—community. People find friends, colleagues, and advisors when they attend Graduate Center programming. They build the support networks—both professional and personal—that graduate students so frequently lack, so if you came to this page to learn about what the Graduate Center is, please share this article. Let more of the community know that, yes, we do in fact exist. We even have real-life doors, and they’re always open to you.