What happens to my SWE membership when I go to graduate school? Are there separate graduate sections? How can I attract grad students to participate in my section? What if I want to start a graduate group at my university? These and many other questions concern current and future graduate students.

For the first part of the session, our panel of graduate students spoke on the SWE Graduate Program at their local universities; both structure and details. Following that we opened the floor to specific questions. Many questions were about getting a program started including coordinating with the undergraduate section, finding funding, grad student vs. undergraduate needs, etc. 

This session was also held as a webinar in September 2012. It should be up on the SWE website soon.

Moderator: Tabitha Voytek (grad-coordinator@swe.org) – Carnegie Mellon University

Panelists:

• Kayla Shaw – University of Notre Dame
• Gwen Effgen   Columbia University
• Katharine Brumbaugh – University of Texas at Austin
• Sofie Leon – University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

While many people pursue academic careers as full-time, tenure-track faculty, colleges and universities also employ significant numbers of adjunct faculty, either full time or part time. Some people use these adjunct positions as a pathway into a more permanent academic position, while for others they are a long-term second job or a temporary part of their career path.

In this panel, three women who have held a variety of adjunct positions spoke about their experiences and gave advice to those interested in adjunct positions.
In the panel’s discussion, the speakers highlighted that someone who wants to be an adjunct needs to love teaching, since that is the primary role of adjunct faculty. Even at a research university, an adjunct position is not intended to be a research role, although it may allow someone to make contacts with those in research labs. Furthermore, adjuncts need to be flexible and able to respond quickly. All three of the women had, on several occasions, only learned of an opportunity to teach a few days before the class started. And finally, they emphasized that they pay scale typically was not very high, and that someone who expects to earn a large paycheck from teaching will be very disappointed. However, all three of the panelists found their experiences teaching as an adjunct to be personally rewarding.

Panelists:

• Diane L. Peters, P.E., Ph.D. is currently a Senior Control Systems Engineer at LMS International. She has taught as an adjunct at both a community college and a regional university.
• Anne M. Lucietto is currently a graduate student at Purdue University. She has extensive industry experience, and has taught as an adjunct for over 25 years at a variety of colleges and universities. Most recently, she has been developing and delivering on-line courses in the community college environment.
• Cheryl Hanzlik, formerly employed by Xerox Corporation, is a confocal microscopy technician and adjunct faculty member at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Our three panelists were able to discuss doing research abroad on three different continents.

Marcella Vaicik explained how being an NSF East Asia and Pacific Summer Institute Fellowship awardee meant that she was listed as the PI on her proposal and it allowed her to spend 3 months in Taiwan doing research.

Katherine Alfredo spent closer to a year working in Ghana doing drinking water research as a Fulbright Scholar. Our third panelist, Prinda Wanakule, Ph.D., was a research assistant in Europe at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland. She obtained this position through her SWE network.

International Member Coordinator, Jennifer Patterson, Ph.D. had done a postdoctoral fellowship there in the same field and connected Prinda with a PI there.They all shared amusing and interesting stories about their adjustments to a different culture and the challenges involved in completing a research proposal in a set amount of time.

​While entertaining and informative about research in other countries, this panel was also a great resource to anyone interested in applying for fellowships. See the links below for more information on the fellowships that were discussed:

• NSF East Asia and Pacific Summer Institute: http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5284
• Fulbright Fellowship: http://us.fulbrightonline.org/
• Whitaker International Program: http://www.whitaker.org/