GPSO E-Newsletter: October 17, 2013

In this Issue:

Upcoming GPSO Events: IU Board of Trustees Meeting

Application Deadline: GPSO Fall Travel Award

Open Meeting Space: IU Grad House

Teaching Resource: iRubric

Symposium: "Capturing Resilience"

Guest Article: What Does It Mean to Maintain Your Health?

GPSO plans your weekend!

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Upcoming GPSO Events

IU Board of Trustees Meeting - TODAY and Tomorrow

The IU Board of Trustees will be holding their next open meeting for IU Bloomington on today and tomorrow, October 17 and 18. For schedule and agenda, please see their website.

IU Libraries Open Access Week - October 21-25

Join us for Open Access Week 2013 to connect with the IUB academic and research communities, and to learn what it means to make open access a new norm in scholarship and research.

This year, we co-sponsor with the IU Libraries and Office of Scholarly Communication to host events all week, including two complementary roundtable discussions to reflect on the widespread implications of open access for student and professional communities and society as a whole; workshops on student publishing (see our Facebook event!), data management for grant proposals, and data visualization; and seminars on sustainable open access principles and copyright.

See the Open Access website for more details on the week.

First Friday - Save the Date! - November 1

November's First Friday Social Hour will be held at Atlas Bar with free Aver's Pizza!

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Application Deadline: GPSO Fall Travel Award

The application deadline for the GPSO Fall Travel Award is Sunday, October 20 (11:59pm).

For more information on eligibility, criteria, and the application and review process, please visit our GPSO Awards Homepage.

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Open Meeting Space: IU Grad House

Do you have an IU club, organization, or study group in need of a meeting place? GPSO is opening its doors for your use!

The Grad House is located at 803 E. 8th Street and has a conference room and living room, each seating 8-10 people, for you to reserve.

Availability:

• Monday: 10:30am - 3pm
• Tuesday: 9am - 4pm
• Wednesday: 10:30am - 3pm
• Thursday: 9am - 3pm
• Friday: 1 - 4pm

If you would like an evening or weekend meeting time, please contact gpso@indiana.edu with your request, and we will do our best to have a representative present to unlock the building.

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Teaching Resource: iRubric

iRubric, a rubric-creation and grading tool, is now available campuswide and is accessible through Oncourse. iRubric is the subject of two new pages on the CITL website (Rubrics and iRubric Support and Rubric Creation: Four Simple Steps) and the upcoming CITL workshop listed below. 

Rubrics and iRubric: Getting Started
Tuesday, October 22, 9:30-11 a.m., CITL Workshop Room (Wells Library E243)
Monday, October 28, 2:30-4 p.m., CITL Workshop Room (Wells Library E243)
In this workshop, CITL consultants Laura Plummer, Jo Ann Vogt, Cordah Robinson, and Madeleine Gonin will discuss how instructors use rubrics to assess students' work and maintain equity in assigning grades. The presenters will share methods for representing grading criteria in a rubric grid and will demonstrate how to use the iRubric tool, newly integrated into Oncourse, to grade student work. 
Read More and Register 

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Symposium: "Capturing Resilience"

In the crossroads of the United States we face economic and environmental struggles that are reflections of national and global problems, but nevertheless unique to our region.  We believe developing a strategy to confront these challenges at the regional level is key to securing a prosperous future. The strategy must be bold enough to do our part in solving national problems, yet grounded enough to preserve the resources and values of our region. Capturing Resilience is a summit to bring together leaders from government, industry, agriculture, and academia to begin the regional conversation to draft and implement this strategy.

Focus Areas:

• Smart Growth We have been gifted with historic and picturesque small towns, although it seems that many of these cities have lost their pulse. Smart Growth is a topic that will address moving forward in community development to revitalize urban cores and create walkable downtowns.
• Regenerative Agriculture is a topic that is core to the economic and social fabric of Mid-America. We must begin to revitalize degraded lands if we are going to maintain our productivity. Further, we must make difficult decisions in balancing the affordability of our food and the availability of arable land and clean water for future generations. 

• Resource Productivity Mid-America is known for robust manufacturing initiatives and numerous international companies call our region home. As such, we are privileged with industry models and innovators to lead us in discussion on how to move forward in mapping how our products are made with their whole life cycle in mind.

This event is FREE and OPEN to the public thanks to our sponsors. Registration is required. This event is organized by the Office of Sustainability at Purdue and the Ecological Sciences and Engineering Graduate Program in cooperation with the Smart Strategy Initiative of the New America Foundation. To get involved in organizing, please contact ese@purdue.edu.

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Guest Article: What Does It Mean to Maintain Your Health?

By Kaitlin Gallagher via Inside Higher Ed

Previous articles have chronicled grad student mental health issues, specifically related to anxiety and depression. So what does it mean to take care of your mental health? Answers could include medication, counseling, and better work-life balance.  But such solutions don’t answer the question about what we as grad students can do to improve the mental health status of our community.

This article is not only geared to those diagnosed with a disorder, but to anyone who has felt like they will never finish, has endured the post-comprehensive exam burnout, been in the open-ended proposal or all-but-dissertation stages. While graduate school is challenging, none of us deserve to feel like crappier versions of our best self while pursuing it.

Here is a by-no-means exhaustive list of 15 tips for how we can take care of our mental health and of those in the grad student community.

1.    Have open discussions with peers (both within and outside of school) about the perils of graduate school.

2.    Be honest with yourself and others. Are you doing what you want? Do you actually tell people how your degree is going when they ask you?

3.    Concentrate on your degree and take control of your destiny. Comparing yourself to others doesn’t help unless you learn from these people and take action towards your degree.

4.    Learn to say no.

5.    Take some quiet time to yourself. Do something you love or engage in meditation and mindfulness exercises.

6.    Seek help early from your colleagues, supervisor, counselor and/or doctor.

7.    Pay attention to your life outside of school. This includes financial, social, household, and personal hygiene maintenance.

8.    Eat well. GradHacker has written posts about how to eat well as a grad student on a budget. Scoping the internet for interesting food blogs or cool ideas can help make this a less stressful task.

9.    Exercise will help out with your mental health and also give you a break from your studies. Make sure you schedule it into your calendar like you would anything else.

10. Find ways to make your tasks more efficient. Make the effort to find systems that will make your life easier. David Allen’s Getting Things Done, using code to streamline processing, incorporating checklists into my data collections, and using an app called lift to keep track of daily non-school tasks work very well for me.

11. Eliminate the word “should” from your vocabulary. Coulda, shoulda, woulda, didn’t. Dwelling on what you should have done in the past is of no use to your future. It also increases our sense of shame over perceived failures.

12. Educate yourself about common issues grad students face. Imposter syndrome, perfectionism, procrastination are a few things that you can educate yourself about early in your degree so you can spot the issues in yourself and others as you progress.

13. Educate your family and friends about common issues grad students face. If the people who are important to you know about the issues you may face, they can look out for you as well.

14. Confront your fears early. Hate giving presentations? Don’t let this fear fester. The earlier you deal with such fears the less time this fear has to build up and get worse.

15. Make sleep a priority.  

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GPSO plans your weekend!

October 18- 20:

• October 18: 46th Annual Hilly Hundred Bicycle Tour (Edgewood High School/Ellettsville, free)

• October 19, 8:30am: Bloomington's Breast Cancer Awareness Walk (Morton Street Showers Common, free)

• October 20, 7-10pm: Haunted Hayride and Stables (8308 S. Rockport Road, $10-15)

Nothing look good to you?

Check out the ongoing exhibits featured in the sidebar or visit www.bloomingtonscene.com and www.visitbloomington.com for the full on- and off-campus scoop.

Have an event to promote?

Email me at gpso@indiana.edu, and I can help you spread the e-word to our fellow grad students.

Go have some fun!

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