Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program: The Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program fosters innovative and collaborative research and empowers students to "own" their education. Student and advisor select faculty from several departments or even schools within the university to serve on the supervisory committee.
Virtual Orientation: The new online graduate orientation allows students to get specific information at their convenience--before arrival and during their first weeks here. New features include advice on how to manage life in graduate school and take charge of one's graduate education. Greater emphasis is placed on career planning and professional development. Students are guided in creating personal education strategies through self-assessment.
Professional Ethics Training: The virtual orientation includes 14 required online Professional Ethics Training modules, including the topics of academic honesty, plagiarism, and sexual harassment. As Chris Pascal, Director of the Office of Research Integrity, US Dept. of Health and Human Services has said, "Graduate schools play an extremely important role in the intergenerational transmission of the practices, norms, values, and beliefs of the research community." Binghamton University takes that role very seriously, and is one of only a few universities to require this training for all graduate students. Pre- and post-test components will help us assess the effectiveness of this new requirement.
Improved TA orientation: New Teaching Assistants are required to completel several online modules, such as Learning Styles, Brain Chemistry & Learning, and Art of Public Speaking. The Graduate School and the Center for Learning & Teaching and Library Services also partner to conduct a full-day session introducing new TAs to modern teaching methods for university-level instruction. Mini-lectures are interspersed with small-group discussions co-led by faculty, staff and senior TAs, and a "working" lunch lets new TAs meet the Graduate Directors. The live session includes the topics of diversity, engaging students for learning, and academic honesty.
Graduate-level Writing Skills & Tasks: This required online writing module has 21 units that take about 10 minutes each to complete. Our goals are to help students write better, edit their own work, master common professional writing tasks, and use writing as a tool for better thinking. Typical feedback from students includes: "Very instructive and meticulous, easy to understand and very helpful." "Good general coverage of professional writing tasks." Binghamton is one of only a few universities to require this training for all graduate students.
New Faculty Orientation: The Graduate School has also reorganized part of the orientation for new faculty. Updated sessions address teaching via student-centered learning techniques, using Blackboard (the new online teaching tool), research and scholarship at BU, and mentoring students.
More accelerated degrees: A growing array of accelerated degree programs allows Binghamton undergraduates to complete their bachelor's and master's degrees in 5 years. By combining undergraduate and graduate courses in their senior year, students can earn an advanced degree in less time, bringing needed skills to the job market, increasing their earning power, and becoming eligible more quickly for doctoral programs.
Dual Degrees: Binghamton offers newly approved dual-degree Masters in Social Work/Masters in Public Administration and Masters in Nursing/Masters in Public Administration.
PhD in Translation Studies: BU now has the only PhD program in Translation Studies in USA. The discipline of Translation Studies has become increasingly important with globalization.
Multidisciplinary graduate program in Evolutionary Studies (EvoS): This program, the only one of its kind in the world, brings together faculty and graduate students from Asian history, art history, anthropology, biology, engineering, philosophy, political science, psychology and management. Collaborative research initiatives include a traveling museum exhibit on the arts from an evolutionary perspective that will be shown at the New York Academy of Sciences, among other venues.
Career & professional development for all graduate students: This program emphasizes development of core competencies: communication, teamwork, leadership and big-picture thinking. It coordinates workshops and other activities provided by the Graduate School, Career Development Center, Center for Learning & Teaching, Center for Quality, Technology Training Center and University Libraries.
Electronic theses & dissertations: Within a few years, electronic document storage and distribution is expected to surpass print format. Along with several other major universities, BU now requires electronic submission of dissertations to the Graduate School. This dynamic new technology has several benefits. Electronic submission dramatically increases global readership, from a few requests for hardcopy per year to hundreds per year electronically. Supplemental multimedia files are easily incorporated into an electronic work. Now a thesis can include an audio file to illustrate musical phrasing, or a video file to demonstrate setting up an art exhibition, or a computer program of three-dimensional, rotating molecules. And, there are significant cost reductions for libraries through reduced handling and storage needs.
