Message from the GCC Executive Committee
As our organization has grown enormously in the past five years, so has the excellent work, number, and size of our various committees and groups.
There are now 13 committees operating within GCC.
The GCC has arrived to a point where it’s challenging for everyone to know what’s going on across the organization. The Executive Committee is working to facilitate more effective means of communication to ameliorate these challenges, in a variety of ways.
One 2021 initiative is convening quarterly Committee and Regional Director leadership meetings, to enable information sharing and collaboration between groups. This helps leverage our collective bandwidth and amplifies the work we do as an organization.
View the Q1 Committee & Leadership Updates here.
Below you will find Committee & Regional Director Leadership updates targeted to showcase many exciting developments, resources, and engagement opportunities within GCC. We look forward to connecting you all with opportunities to support you as professionals, as we strive to achieve our mission: to lead the advancement of the graduate-level career and professional development community.
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Committee Updates:
Benchmarking, Carpe Careers, Communications, Conference, Diversity, Education Research, Finance, Governance, ImaginePhD, Mentoring, Ph.D. Outcomes, Professional Development, Regional Directors, Virtual Career Expo
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Annual Conference Update!
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Benchmarking
Thank you GCC members for the wonderful response rate for the annual Individual Survey! A total of 223 GCC members completed the survey this year. We’re looking forward to sharing the data and insights with the GCC membership in June at the Virtual Annual Conference.
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Carpe Careers Writing Group
The Carpe Careers Writing Group is open to anyone seeking to share actionable and optimistic advice with the broader community. Whether you have personal experiences you want to share, or advice based on the experiences of those you have served at your institutions, we are excited to have you involved.
Sign-up on the GCC website today!
We also always need volunteers to serve as Peer Editors. If you love giving feedback on stories and narratives, enjoy spotting punctuation and spelling mistakes, or generally just like to offer suggestions for how GCC members who are writing posts for Carpe Careers can share engaging advice within 1500 words, then please sign up to join the Writing Group and let Joseph Barber know you are interested in being a Peer Editor. Sign-up on the GCC website today!
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Communications
The GCC Communications committee is excited to launch a refreshed GCC Member Newsletter in Spring 2021 on our new MailChimp platform. We are seeking individuals to volunteer to contribute and curate content for the newsletter which will have a key focus on highlighting GCC members and is planned to be distributed 4 times per year.
This newsletter is more people focused than the Quarterly Committee Updates you are currently reading.
Volunteer for Newsletter Team
Share your updates & experiences with us!
Use our new all-in-one form to:
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Nominate yourself or another member to be highlighted
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Share professional updates, including recent publications in the education research space
- Share advice on navigating a career in graduate-level career & professional development
- Share your experience volunteering with the GCC or attending a GCC annual or regional meeting
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Conference
Save the dates for the GCC's 2021 Annual Conference taking place VIRTUALLY June 23-25, 2021 with the Pre-Conference for New Professionals on June 22
Conference Theme: Meeting the Moment: Re-evaluating and Re-inventing Career and Professional Development.
A Conference for Leaders in Graduate and Postdoctoral Career and Professional Development
Special thanks to our wonderful conference sponsors: Burroughs Wellcome Fund, American Chemical Society, VersatilePhD, Beyond the Professoriate, Archer Career, Interstride, Case Coach, Genetics Society of America, Personal Finance for PhDs, Free the PhD, & Polygence.
Learn more and register to attend today!
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Diversity
The Diversity Committee will be releasing its Resource Guide for Inclusive, Equitable and Accessible Programming at this year’s Virtual GCC Annual Conference.
The Resource Guide is designed to provide an entry point of resources for meeting the needs of GCC member constituents from historically marginalized communities and populations, as well as the broader graduate student/postdoctoral fellow community. The Resource Guide will enable GCC members to better understand the unique perspectives and experiences of people from historically and otherwise marginalized communities in order to provide effective, successful advising and programming. The Resource Guide shares best practices in supporting students and postdocs from a range of backgrounds, and encourages practitioners to consider intersecting identities and tailor approaches to the whole learner.
Don’t miss their Annual Conference session on using the new guide to be held on Friday, June 25th, 3:45-4:45 PM Eastern!
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Education Research
The Education Research Committee continues to hold successful Open Forum meetings for members to share education research activity and provide collaborative feedback on manuscripts and projects. A sub-committee continues to work on the Non-Academic Career Readiness Assessment tool (new name tbd!), with twelve members completing experimental design, literature review, IRB approval from three institutions, and are soon launching data collection and fundraising.
Ed Research seeks a chairperson or co-chairs for the upcoming year, so please contact Natalie Lundsteen pastpres@gradcareerconsortium.org if you have interest in leading the committee, and also if you would like to join us as a committee member.
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Finance - NEW Committee
As the GCC continues to grow and develop, we have identified a need to ensure our fiscal stewardship, and seek oversight of our financial matters by creating a representative group of our members. To help ensure that we continue to meet the needs of our membership, the GCC Executive Committee felt it important to establish a new committee to ensure the funds it stewards are spent to meet the needs of its growing membership.
The GCC Exec Committee conducted a call for volunteers for this new committee in early April and had five members sign up for the new GCC Finance Committee. Those members are Katie Homar; North Carolina State University, Shana Slebioda; UC San Diego, Mackenzie Sullivan; University of Minnesota, Laura Schram; University of Michigan, and Letha Woods; Meharry Medical College. The GCC Finance Committee will help provide financial analysis, advice, and oversight of all aspects of GCC financial operations.
Possible areas where the finance committee could assist include…
- gathering board and committee needs to develop an annual proposed budget
- helping develop, forecast, and maintain revenue streams including membership, and annual conference
- identifying opportunities for and building relationships towards sponsorship
- facilitating and assisting with researching and writing grant proposals
If you have questions about the GCC Finance Committee, please contact Eric Vaughn at treasurer@gradcareerconsortium.org.
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Governance
The Governance Committee managed the 2021 elections process, and also a bylaws amendment to extend terms of office for the Secretary and Treasurer (terms of office are now two years instead of one year.) We will be managing an extensive revamp of organizational bylaws, including membership eligibility and organizational mission, in the summer of 2021, with information sessions for members to learn more and discuss proposed changes.
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ImaginePhD
ImaginePhD now has over 38,000 users!
Recently the committee co-hosted with the GCC Professional Development Committee a webinar with Katina Rogers, Ph.D., to talk about her new book Putting the Humanities PhD to Work on May 25th.
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Mentoring
This committee seeks to promote mentorship within, between, and beyond the GCC. It currently connects early-stage GCC professionals with more senior individuals within the GCC for a year-long mentoring relationship.
Stay tuned for a new call for GCC mentees & mentors coming after this year’s GCC Annual Conference.
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Ph.D. Outcomes
Watch a presentation on Graduate-Level Career Outcomes Reporting: Surveying the Landscape of Classification Methodologies on the GCC's YouTube Channel.
Please help us keep the GCC’s database of publicly available GCC member institution career outcomes current. The database contains hyperlinks to reports or interactive dashboards displaying quantitative outcomes of master’s-level, graduate-level, and postdoctoral-level alumni. You can help us update this annually by commenting directly on this google sheet through July 31; each September, an updated database will be released here.
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Professional Development
The Professional Development Committee has hosted several webinars and workshops over the past few months geared towards sharing resources and best practices with the GCC membership. Many of the webinar recordings can be found on the Professional Development Programming Playlist on the GCC YouTube Channel.
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Regional Directors
We held 7 regional meetings successfully! Thanks to hosts, planning committees and all members who contributed and participated!
- We want to extend our thanks to outgoing Regional Directors, RDs, (Amy, Jake, Rachel and Shawn) for all their efforts through Spring, and our excitement for our incoming RDs (Amanda, Daniel, Heather and Jenny). A full list of regions, and regional directors can be found here https://www.gradcareerconsortium.org/regions.php
- RDs are evaluating regional meeting feedback and discussion of next year’s format given what we have learned - (online vs in-person, planning committee vs host, etc)
- We are planning for regional networking session at the Annual Conference - stay tuned for updates
- “Local News” --- Mid Atlantic held “coffee and careers” session to discuss upcoming board elections, annual conference proposals, other engagement opportunities for GCC members with the organization
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Virtual Career Expo
Thanks to all the schools who participated in the 2021 Virtual Career Expo on March 3rd – it was a great success! We had 39 schools participate, 52 employers and just under 1,000 candidates attend the event.
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