National Graduate-Professional Student Appreciation Week: A Recap
Back in 1993, NAGPS created a National Graduate-Professional Student Appreciation Week in order to increase awareness of the vital role that graduate and professional students play on campuses and in communities throughout the country. This year, Graduate-Professional Student Appreciation Week (GPSAW) was held April 4-8, and we continue to hear about the great events put on by institutions across the country to recognize their graduate and professional students. Here are a few of the events held last week for GPSAW:
- Free Breakfast to kick off the week
- Massages
- Jorge Cham (from PhD Comics) Comedy Event
- Research Symposium
More than 40 institutions from across the country celebrated or recognized GPSAW - was your school one of them? Click here to see the complete listing of schools that celebrated GPSAW, and make sure to e-mail me if your school celebrated GPSAW but isn't on the list. Also, if your school put on GPSAW events, I would love to hear about them - drop me a line!
Since the inception of GPSAW, it's been customary for graduate professional student organizations to request proclamations in recognition of the week from their local and state governments. This year, the governors of Arizona and Texas and the city council of Pittsburgh were some of the government officials recognizing GPSAW - click here to see the proclamations.
Did your campus miss GPSAW this year? Are you interested in making sure that this doesn't happen again, and that you join the ranks of campuses recognizing this important week? We've assembled several resources to help you organize a GPSAW on your campus, full of ideas of things to do, templates for proclamations, and so much more! Simply click here to access our GPSAW web site where you'll find all of these resources. Graduate and professional students play an important role on our campuses - it's important that we raise awareness about what we do as a group, and we want to help you to accomplish this goal. Please let me know if there's any questions that we can question or information that we can provide to help you (or your organization) organize a GPSAW - I look forward to adding your institution to the list next year.
Happy Belated Graduate-Professional Student Appreciation Week!
Jon Kowalski
NAGPS President & CEO
president@nagps.org
Greetings from NAGPS!
Greetings GradShare Blog Readers!
In the coming weeks and months, you'll be seeing periodic blog posts from several officers of the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students (NAGPS). What is NAGPS and what are we doing on GradShare's Blog? NAGPS is the only organization in the United States representing all graduate and professional students nationally, and we've been doing so since 1987. Our organization is entirely volunteer-run, and we are all graduate and professional students ourselves. We'll be posting on the GradShare Blog in the future because we're genuinely interested in issues regarding your experience at graduate school and we want to engage directly with as many students as possible.
NAGPS' mission is threefold, and essentially focuses on building a network of student leaders to share best practices and interact, providing resources for students, and advocating for graduate and professional students. As a result, our blog posts are going to span the many areas that we cover as an organization. From examining the potential effect of proposed legislation, to letting you know about upcoming NAGPS activities where you can network and share best practices, to informing you about valuable resources that you can take advantage of as an NAGPS member, we are going to do our best to keep you informed about everything that is going on in the world of graduate and professional students. Let us know how we're doing - drop our Director of Communications a line with requests for blog posts, questions about NAGPS, and feedback on existing posts.
In between blog posts, there are plenty of ways that you can interact with NAGPS. The best way to do so is to visit our web site - www.nagps.org. We post all information about upcoming events here, as well as summarize benefits and give you ways to interact with your legislators about pressing issues regarding graduate and professional student education. Looking for a job? Check out the NAGPS Job Bank, which pulls together job postings from a multitude of resources. We also have a presence on social networking platforms, including Twitter (@nagps, @nagpslcc and @GRADjobsNAGPS) and Facebook (facebook.com/nagps). We're eager to interact with you and to hear about your issues and ideas!
Look for more from NAGPS in the coming weeks. We're excited to be a part of the GradShare Blog and we plan on providing you with valuable content that will help improve your life as a graduate or professional student. Stay tuned!
Best Regards,
Jon Kowalski
President & CEO, NAGPS