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