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  • Toyosi Tejumade-Morgan, photographed against a black background.

    HRI Interseminars Spotlight: Toyosi Tejumade-Morgan

    Toyosi Tejumade-Morgan (Theatre) shares her experiences as a member of the 2022–2023 graduate cohort for “Imagining Otherwise: Speculation in the Americas,” the inaugural Interseminars initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation. 

  • GYSS attendees stand beside an outdoor installation.

    Illinois Graduate Students Share Experiences from the Global Young Scientists Summit

    Ten graduate students from the University of Illinois traveled to Singapore for the Global Young Scientists Summit. We chatted with them about their experiencesand why others should consider attending. 

  • Illustration of a a diverse group of leaders

    Leadership Award Winners Share What Inspires Their Service

    We caught up with the recipient and honorees of the 2020 Graduate Student Leadership Award to ask what inspired them to pursue leadership roles and what is most rewarding about their experience. Their responses are compassionate and inspiring.

  • Learn a New Skill (or a New Language!) for Free this Summer

    Summer “Break” can be a definite misnomer when you are a grad student. You may not be sitting in class or teaching section, but experiments, research, and writing don’t stop just because the academic year has come to a close. Even though you’re still busy, the change of schedule for summer can make it a great time to develop skills you need to be successful in graduate school. Whether you’re trying to master an old skill or need to pick up programming/conversational French/business-plan-writing or any of hundreds of other skills you can think of – the university has free and/or low-cost tools to help you get the job done. Read on for some of the services you should take advantage of before school’s back in session.

  • Woman staring at a computer screen, biting a pencil in frustration

    Lessons From a Grad Student Job Search Support Group

    This Spring, Mike Firmand started the first-ever job search support group for graduate students at the University of Illinois. Here's what Mike learned from listening to them and leading the group. Read the original post on Inside Higher Education.

  • A set of concentric rings inside of a circle. The rings are labeled: Macrosystem, Exosystem, Mesosystem, Microsystem, Self.

    Lessons Learned from a PhD Student who Studies PhD Students’ Stress and Coping

    Joe Mirabelli has spent years studying graduate students' experiences with stress. Now he's sharing tips for managing the feelings and stressors of graduate school.

  • Letters of Reference for Fellowship Applications

    “Applications must include three letters of reference…”

    If you’re applying for graduate research fellowships and grants, you will likely find something along these lines in the application instructions. These letters are absolutely critical to the success of your application, yet you have no control over them — or do you?

    There is no “one-size-fits-all” set of guidelines on this topic. Letters of reference are by their very nature highly personal. Ways of building relationships will also vary according to discipline, the nature of the research, and the applicant’s career goal. That’s why it’s essential to get advice from your advisor and talk with other students in your program about their own successful strategies. However, there are a few overarching points to consider.

  • Life and Research in the Time of COVID

    On Thursday, April 9, PhD candidate Caitlin Brooks successfully defended her dissertation proposal on narratives of home at Burning Man, the global arts and culture festival held annually in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. The next day, Burning Man was cancelled for the first time in its 30+ year history. In this piece, she talks about what it looks like to pivot her research for the current times while honoring the loss caused by this disruption. 

  • From left to right, the URAP mentor and mentee panelists: Ishva Minefee, Mecca Muhammad, Emily DeFilippo, and Madeline Decker.

    Looking for a mentoring opportunity? Why You Should Be A URAP Grad Mentor.

    Are you looking for a mentoring opportunity? Whether you are interested in a career in academia or industry, you should be.

  • AI @ Illinois

    Making AI Legible with Clara Belitz and Ali Zaidi

    Bri Lafond (Writing Studies doctoral candidate and Graduate College Career Exploration Fellow) sits down with Clara Belitz (School of Information Sciences) and Ali Zaidi (Computer Science) for a dynamic conversation about how generative AI has the potential to affect a lot of different aspects of our day-to-day lives.

  • Making the Most of Summer: Developing Skills Employers Want

    As you move into your first summer as a graduate student at Illinois, now is a perfect milestone to take time to reflect on your progress as a student and scholar.

    Over the past year, you’ve gained new skills and knowledge in your field, but success beyond graduate school requires taking a comprehensive approach to your professional development. It requires more than technical skills and field-specific knowledge.

  • Making Your Skills Make Sense Outside Academia

    I’ll start with the good news: as a graduate student, you have a ton of fascinating, impressive skills. You know how to do lots of different things, and you know how to learn even more of them. The bad news really isn’t so bad, just initially frustrating: many of those amazing skills you have aren’t always going to make a ton of sense to people outside your field, let alone outside of academia entirely. At least not at first.

    Does that mean those skills aren’t valuable outside academia? Absolutely not. It just means you have to be creative and translate them. By shifting how you think and talk about your skills, you can help potential employers see the links between what you've done and what they need—and make it easier for them to hire you. And you’ll also make it easier for yourself to discover and explore broad, interesting career options.

  • A student having a conversation through a computer.

    Managing Stress in a Job Search

    You came to grad school seeking knowledge and skills that would prepare you for a meaningful career. Through hard work you’ve developed expertise in your field. While you can’t avoid the stress of a job search, you can make a plan to deal with it.

  • Marrying Math and Art through Outreach

    When Michelle Delcourt was presented with the choice between math or art summer programs in high school, she knew that by choosing mathematics, she’d never leave art far behind. “For me, math is a very creative process,” she said. “Math and art are very similar, the process of doing research in doing mathematics is similar to the way that I approach making a painting or seeing a piece of artwork.”

    Now, the 5th year PhD candidate and winner of this year’s Graduate Student Leadership Award uses her love of math and art to engage young girls and underrepresented minority students in math through community outreach programs. She hopes that her approach could help attract students who might not otherwise choose mathematics.

  • Lights on a wall read "work and play."

    Maximize Your Sleep, Rest, and Work

    In our first post on sustainability and productivity, Daniel Wong outlined three principles for a sustainable and productive life and introduced how they can apply to each of three key areas of your life. In this post, we’ll explore some actionable ways that you can implement these principles in the areas of sleep, rest, and work.

  • Meet Ana Martin: Fulbright Research Fellow in Barcelona, Spain

    Hola! My name is Ana Martin, I am a 6th year PhD student in Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Illinois. This month has been pretty exciting for me as it marks the beginning of my Fulbright Research Fellowship in Spain. Although it was a long process getting here, I’m excited to embark on the adventure of living abroad while I complete my PhD research at the University of Barcelona. For anyone interested in teaching English or conducting research abroad, I highly recommend applying for a Fulbright Fellowship. Hopefully through this post you will gain some insight into the application process and some aspects of moving abroad.

  • Melesse Biniyam

    Meet Our Fellows: Biniyam Melesse, Fulbright-Hays DDRA Awardee

    For Biniyam Melisse, winning a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) fellowship was “a match made in heaven.” 

  • Meet Our Fellows: Busra Karagobek, Visiting Fulbright Fellow from Ankara, Turkey

    In this special "Meet Our Fellows" post, SAGE member Meera interviews Busra Karagobek, a PhD student from Turkey, who is currently studying at the University of Illinois under a Fulbright Scholarship. Let's meet Busra!

  • Schmidt Science Fellow: Daniel Raudabaugh

    Meet Our Fellows: Daniel Raudabaugh, Schmidt Science Fellow

    It’s not every day you get to name a new species of fungi, but Daniel Raudabaugh (PhD Plant Biology, 2019) named two during his time as a graduate student at Illinois. Hongkongmyces snookiorum, named to honor his grandparents who let him collect on their land for his pilot study, and Coniella lustricola, Latin for “bog-loving.”

  • Destiny Williams-Dobosz

    Meet Our Fellows: Destiny Williams-Dobosz, NSF Graduate Research Fellow

    “Why is science so hard for students?” This question has intrigued Destiny Williams-Dobosz, a Ph.D. student in Educational Psychology and NSF Graduate Research Fellow.  

  • Meet Our Fellows: Ford Fellows on Campus

    To increase diversity in higher education, the Ford Foundation offers predoctoral, dissertation, and postdoctoral fellowships. The goal is three-fold – increasing university’s ethnic and racial diversity, maximizing the educational benefits of diversity, and increasing the number of professors who use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students.

    We talked to three University of Illinois graduate students from across campus who received a Ford Fellowship to learn more about the program.

  • Lauren Hagler, Illinois Sloan Scholar

    Meet Our Fellows: Lauren Hagler, Illinois Sloan Scholar

    Lauren Hagler fell in love with Chemistry during her first general chemistry class at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. 

  • Meet Our Fellows: Matt Haugen, Fulbright Fellow studying Chinese Sport Industry

    Last April, after nearly a yearlong process and an arduous wait, Matthew Haugen was notified that he had been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, which would allow him the opportunity to complete his dissertation research project studying sport education in China. His fellowship experience ultimately encouraged him to pivot his dissertation research project to better represent and inform the future he sees for himself as a scholar.

  • Matthew Boudreau

    Meet Our Fellows: Matthew Boudreau, NCI Pre/Postdoctoral Fellow

    “All of us, unfortunately, have a personal experience with cancer impacting a friend or family member. It touches a lot of our hearts. I saw the depths of what we could not treat through a life experience of a friend,” Matthew Boudreau, PhD Candidate in Chemistry said. “I think that was the first spark for me to become involved in cancer research.”

  • Matthew Klopfenstein at the newly-opened Zariad’e Park, with the Kremlin in the background

    Meet Our Fellows: Matthew Klopfenstein, Fulbright Fellow in Moscow

    Matthew Klopfenstein has spend the last seven months deep in the world of Russian archives exploring how the deaths of female pop stars in the early 1900s entered the public realm and became national phenomena. Read about Matthew's day to day life as a Fulbright Fellow living in Moscow, Russia.

  • Meet Our Fellows: Nubras Samayeen, American Association of University Women

    When she finishes her degree at Illinois, Nubras Samayeen may be the first woman in Bangladesh to hold a PhD in Landscape Architecture. This is the realization of a goal she's had since she was a child and is, in no small part, something she's doing for her own two young daughters and for other Bangladeshi women who, like her, have unconventional dreams. Here’s her story.

  • Raquel Escobar

    Meet Our Fellows: Raquel Escobar, Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow

    Graduate education prepares you for many ways to positively impact the world around you. For Raquel Escobar, recent doctoral graduate in History, the opportunity to have a broad and active impact on the community comes through a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellowship. The fellowship allows Escobar to marry her scholarly expertise in history, memory and public humanities with a position at the Humanities Action Lab (HAL) at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

  • Meet Our Fellows: Safiyah Muhammad, Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow

    Ford Fellow Safiyah Muhammad says that she learned to teach from the best – her mom. Her mother homeschooled her before she was old enough to enroll in kindergarten and served as her fourth grade teacher as well. “She never limited me in what I could do. She never told me I was too young. She was my very first and obviously most impactful teacher,” Safiyah said. With the help of the Ford Fellowship, she hopes to channel that feeling into her work as a researcher, teacher, and scholar at Illinois.

  • SAGE

    Meet the 2020 - 2021 SAGE Board Members

    Students Advising on Graduate Education (SAGE) is a student advisory board and leadership opportunity for graduate students at Illinois that fosters active engagement with Graduate College programs and initiatives. SAGE board members enrich graduate student community, build leadership and administrative skills, and strengthen Graduate College services and programs. As we embark on a new academic year, we are excited to introduce our 2020 - 2021 SAGE board!

  • Meet the 2023 - 2024 SAGE Board Members

    SAGE is a graduate student advisory board and leadership opportunity fostering active engagement with Illinois Graduate College programs and initiatives.

  • A mentor converses with a graduate student in the lab.

    Mentorship Is Intentional: Establishing a Mentor-Mentee Relationship in Graduate School

    Claire Baytas (PhD, ’23; comparative literature) is back with a second post in our mentoring series that focuses on the processes of choosing a mentor, agreeing on mutual expectations, and maintaining productive lines of communication.

  • A mind map graphic. The graphic reads: Mind Mapping: How it can help you, how to use it as a prewriting tool, and how to get started.

    Mind Mapping as a Prewriting Strategy

    Starting a writing project can be stressful, but developing prewriting strategies can help us be creative, build momentum, and get the most out of writing sessions. John Moist shares strategies for using mind maps as a prewriting tool.

  • More Than Just Buzzwords: Social Media as a Tool for Personal Branding in STEM

    nspired by nothing more than a joking remark from a colleague on the importance of securing a unique domain name before someone “stole it,” I made my personal website, RituRaman.com, in my second year of graduate school. Luckily for me, launching this website was the first step in an ongoing attempt to develop a coherent web presence and recognizable personal brand.

    Before I continue, I would like to acknowledge that terms like “personal brand” can often come across as meaningless buzzwords used by millennials to justify a relatively self-centered use of social media. When used without context, they make me cringe and feel pretentious – and I understand if they make you do the same – but this blog post isn’t about the philosophical clash between personal modesty and taking selfies. Rather, this post is about crafting your online presence in a way that best represents your personal history, your interests, and your future goals.

    Now that we’ve moved past the obligatory disclaimers, I will attempt to distill the social media lessons I’ve learned over the past few years into a few pithy steps.

  • Navigating Job Offers

    Navigating the Surprising Stress of a Job Offer

    Looking for a job can be pretty terrible, and it’s often a long slog. Amid that stretched-out stress, it’s easy to start thinking of a job offer as a kind of holy grail, a singular solution to all your problems. But what I see over and over again, among the hundreds of graduate students I advise each year, is that the job offer is often its own source of emotional turmoil. A sudden offer, or the sense that one might be incoming, can prompt as much panic as delight.

  • A student stands while having a conversation.

    Negotiating the Ups and Downs of Graduate School with Your Mentor

    Communicating openly with your mentor network can be a challenge. There’s no ready-made script for having effective conversations with a mentor, but building communications within a network of mentors allows you to advocate for yourself, source helpful feedback, and ask for the mentoring you need.

  • New Year - New Thesis Goals

    It’s February and your New Year’s resolutions have started to become habit… or fallen by the wayside. Fortunately, there’s still 11 months in the year to make your thesis a priority. The start of the new year and the new semester is a great time to think about what direction you would like your thesis work to go and to make plans accordingly. Below are five tips to help you set (and stick with) thesis-writing goals.

  • New Year, New You: Taking a Holistic Approach to the Academic Year

    New Year, New You: Taking a Holistic Approach to the Academic Year

    New Year’s resolutions always seem out of place on an academic calendar. January is more of a pause, not the fresh start we see advertised in every grocery store checkout. Andrea Bridges is here to convince you that now is the perfect time to do some self-reflection.

  • A picture of Byron Juma, sitting at a picnic table.

    One Story: Byron Juma, PhD Student in Recreation, Sport & Tourism

    Originally from Kenya, Byron has travelled the world in the pursuit of higher education. 

  • Katie Frye

    One Story Video: Get to Know Microbiology Ph.D. Student, Katie Frye

    Meet Katie Frye a Ph.D. student in Microbiology and a COVID-19 SHIELD: Target, Test, Tell team member.

  • On the Job Hunt: How to Keep Your Options Open

    In the coming months, facing uncertainty head-on and doing what you can to prepare for multiple possible job outcomes is the best thing you can do for your future self, advises Derek Attig.

  • Podcast: A Research Pivot, One Year Later

    It has been a year of COVID. Grad student podcasters share their funniest Zoom stories and Burning Man expert Caitlin Brooks shares insights on the power of community in times of isolation.

  • Cartoons of adults in a variety of fun activities.

    Podcast: Bringing Childlike Approaches to Self-Care

    Abby shares some techniques to lower stress in elementary school students, such as a 5-4-3-2-1 mapping exercise, that might also work for grad students. 

  • Illustration of a woman with a pencil, guitar, mountains and other thoughts above her head.

    Podcast: The Fine Art of Balance

    Theatre doctoral student Vincent Carlson performs "You and Your Work," a poem he wrote inspired by boundary setting and conflicting ideas about work ethic. 

  • A white cup with purple liquid and a smiley face.

    Podcast: You Can’t Pour from an Empty Cup

    SAGE grad student podcasters interview the Counseling Center’s Kamau Grantham, who gives everyone permission to take care of themselves.

  • Podcast: Your Portfolio Will Never Be Perfect or Done

    Landscape designer Saloni Chawla (MLA '18) sits down to talk with us about how she landed her dream job and why she considers it a perfect match.

  • Punit Singhvi's Asphalt Concrete Brownie with Hot Fudge Sauce

    Doctoral student Punit Singhvi reads aloud his award-winning 2020 Image of Research entry and shares his recipe for success.

  • Putting the Break Back into Winter Break: Managing Work and Play During Winter Break

    Semester breaks are the perfect time for some relaxation, spending time with friends and family, and filling up on delicious holiday snacks. But for graduate students working on their theses, winter breaks also mean ample time to get some research and writing done. During my seven-year career as a graduate student, I’ve spent plenty of time trying to achieve the best of both worlds. Though balancing data analysis and cookie baking can be difficult, below are a few tips to help you maximize your research time, and still have fun during the holiday season.

  • Radical Healing / Collective Thriving

    Getting work done looks very different today than it did at the beginning of the Spring semester. For Amir Maghsoodi, PhD student in Educational Psychology, the shift from in-person, clinical counseling training has offered time to deepen his social justice work with the Radical Healing Collective, a group of psychology scholars who work in issues of culture, ethnicity, and race. 

  • Teachers make the world a better place

    Resilient and Ready to Lead, Teachers Make the World a Better Place

    In a time of uncertainty, as instruction and learning transition to digital technologies, College of Education students have an important message to share.

  • Robin Holland: On Taking Chances

    Robin Holland, dual degree candidate in Pathobiology and Veterinary Medicine, doesn’t hesitate to throw her hat in the ring when contests and opportunities present themselves. Robin was awarded People’s Choice at the inaugural Research Live! competition last fall and took home first place in Image of Research the preceding spring.

    As if that weren’t impressive enough, Robin was awarded a prestigious NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) for individuals pursuing dual-doctoral degrees, both a PhD and an MD, DVM, or other medical doctoral degree. This award was created to increase the pool of highly trained clinician-scientists in the biomedical research workforce.

    We sat down with Robin to pick her brain about her career, academic contests, and getting involved. Read on for the interview.