Right, so go ahead and just briefly introduce our lead presenter. So Laura is the Assistant Director of Learning Programs at princeton University's McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, where she leads a program to support graduate students to learn and thrive. This work includes the grad peer coaching program, which she and today's panelists will describe further in a moment. Prior to joining Princeton in 2018, laura was a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education, where she completed a PhD in Human Development and Education. Her scholarly and applied work explores the potential of higher ed institutions to promote optimal development and well-being. And she is particularly interested in the relational aspects of higher ed, as well as the hidden curriculum in quotes, hidden curriculum of doctoral education. So now I'm going to turn it over to Laura. Thank you so much for that very kind introduction, Wes. Yes, I'm Laura, and thank you to all of you in attendance for joining us today. I'm going to actually go ahead and share my screen here. And this is the title of our discussion today. As Wes mentioned, perspectives from grad graduate peer coaches. And I will introduce our three panelists in a moment. I just wanted to give you a lay of the land as we get going. So our plan together for the next hour or so is, as I said, I'll introduce our panelists and then I'll give you a brief background of the genesis of our graduate peer coaching program at our institution which is Princeton. And a little bit of information on our coaches and their training. Then we'll have a conversation primarily focusing on their experiences as coaches and outcomes for them. We know that Coaching happily is getting more attention. I would argue as it should in higher education, particularly academic life and learning coaching. But we found that the attention is often on outcomes for coachees, which is also understandable. There does seem to be more literature and more program development related to working with undergraduate students. So because our program is by and for graduate students, and because we are very interested in learning about other coaches experiences as well in potential beneficial outcomes for their work. We thought it would be interesting to have a panel and share some of our experiences. And then hopefully feel some questions from all of you at the end of our discussion. So that's the plan. And feel free to post questions or comments in the chat as we go along. And then at the end, when we do a formal, more formal Q&A will try to respond to those questions and or you can feel free to raise your actual or virtual hand and just speak up as well. Alright, so without further ado, we have three amazing panelists today. So Suchi Han, could you wave? So everybody sees you. So d is actually about, literally about to complete her PhD here in the Department of East Asian Studies. She is defending her dissertation this upcoming Tuesday, so she will be Dr. Hahn very soon. The title of her dissertation is when China was gone, identities and states of the chateau Turks from 895 to 979. So she is a historian. She has been at Princeton for the past eight years, working on this doctorate. And she's also studied at Seoul National University in Korea. Her home country, and has also conducted work at research institutions from Vienna to Taipei. And she is very humble but also speaks multiple languages. So I always like to share that. She says she's been able to experience and witnesses challenges that grad students face in many different countries and cultures and is particularly interested in working with other international students. So that Sue-Je might've, could you wave and say hi to everybody. Great, Thank you. So Kumar, rich fungi who goes by mitosis, is a rising fifth year grad student in our Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. And minus research lies at the intersection of electronics and neuroscience, specifically in designing electrodes to detect neuronal signals, about which I know nothing but it's incredibly important work. In addition to his work as a scientist, he here at Princeton has been on various panels to help international students as they transition to campus through various orientation programs. He's also served as a leader for the outdoor Action Program, which is a program to help orient and mentor our incoming undergraduate students. So he's an expert in all things wilderness as well as neuroscience. And then last but not least, crystal Raul. Hi, Crystal. Crystal is also a rising fifth year graduate student and she's in her department of geosciences. And a crystal strives to help students develop optimism and positive mindset to foster resilience. And she's also particularly interested in topics as am I, such as motivation, productivity, time management, and behavior change and is very humble as well, but it's actually an expert in those topics and has done a lot of work personally and with coaches and others. So those are our panelists and I promise you'll hear directly from them in a moment. But I wanted to give you a little bit more contexts regarding our grad protein or excuse me, our graduate peer coaching program first. So in this slide, two key concepts. The first is that we know that there are challenges that are common to graduate students really across all institutions. Some of them are what we would call the hidden curriculum of graduate school. All of those sorts of assumptions that students, and frankly, faculty and administrators might make about what people do or don't know or have, or have not experienced as they're coming into graduate school. We know that the length of graduate school can be challenging. It's at our institution on average, depending on the program. Students are here for six years, sometimes five, sometimes seven or eight, depending on their discipline and the type of research they're doing. So it's significantly longer than the undergraduate experience. It's primarily a relationship where the student is working as an apprentice with a primary mentor. That relationship is qualitatively different. We'd argue from advisory relationships for undergrads. We know that a lot of graduate students describe experiencing impostor stress. So questioning whether they actually belong in grad school or at their particular institution. And we know that feelings of loneliness and isolation and mentally actually diagnosable mental health conditions are very high prevalence among graduate students. More prevalent actually been among the undergraduate population. And more prevalent during and post-COVID as well, which is unfortunate but true. So that's in general at our institution. We have just under 3 thousand graduate students, whether that 2900 give or take right now, 95% of our graduate students are doctoral students. So that's one of the things that makes Princeton really distinctive. We don't have professional schools in the way that many of our peer institutions do. So there's no law school, school of education, medical school, nursing school, etc. We only have two programs in which students can complete terminal master's degrees. In the other 41 programs and departments. It's all doctoral students. So they are here between 57 or eight years. 50% of our graduate students are international students and our three panelists today are all international students. As I mentioned, we have 43 different departments and programs. We actually at our institution are very decentralized. And what I mean by that is we do have a graduate school, but each of the departments and programs are very autonomous. And the grad school is engages to some degree in admit the admissions process for all of our graduate students. But the grad school doesn't really create policy in the sense that the individual departments do. So. That can be good in many ways because departments and faculty have independence and freedom and agency. But it can also be really challenging for grad students because there tends to be a lot of variation in student experiences depending on the department that they're in, as well as the advisors that they're working with. So disparity across departments. So in an effort to try to address some of these challenges, we founded our graduate peer coaching program two summers ago. So this will be our third academic year. We got some grant funding to pilot it. And then the pandemic happened. And what was originally meant to be an entirely in-person program of grad students being trained and then working as coaches in one-on-one consultations with peers suddenly had to be all virtual. So it's all virtual in its first year. And in this past year we have offered virtual meetings between coaches and coaches as well as in-person meeting. So how do we conceive of coaching? We think of it as an egalitarian and supportive relationship between coach and cocci. And we conceptualize our coaches as thinking partners. Really, all of our coaches are advanced graduate students here, which means that they've completed their coursework and they've done their candidacy exams at Princeton, we call those general exams. So our folks are post generals, which means that they're all essentially dissertation and working on their own independent research. And that was by design because we know that a lot of earlier grad students have challenges and would like some, some input regarding Navigating coursework and preparing to move through those candidacy exams. We had a couple of objectives which have continued for the program. So first, for coachees, our hope is always been to help promote flourishing and thriving for our grad student population. Number two, to try to make this hidden curriculum of grad school a little bit more explicit. So people might have a clearer sense of how they can carve a path through graduate education that makes sense for them. Then relatedly to help coachees identify and move toward their own authentic goals, personally, professionally and as emerging scholars. And then for the graduate peer coaches, hope has always been that our training and the work itself and our community of coaches can be a form of professional development. And that the coaches experiences are beneficial to them now as students, but hopefully can be generalizable, useful in their lives postgraduate school. That last piece is really what we're going to focus on today. How has that panned out for some of our coaches? We're going to jump ahead here just in the interest of time. And I'll just leave you with this last piece of context before we open it up to our panelists. This slide lists the topics that are coaches go through. They all complete 50 hours of training, which we've done over the past two summers. So that was two hours of synchronous meetings as a group together and then four hours or so of independent study and work. And I won't read these all out loud now, but this gives you a sense of the different topics we were working toward and different types of activities we are practicing. Over the eight weeks of training. You can see that across the topics, there is a big focus on flourishing and well-being. Alright, so without further ado, I wanted to begin the panel discussion with this topic. What might be some lessons learned for you coaches, either during your training and, or in your work in any capacity of working with coachees just to support your peers going forward. So if you have one to two lessons learned that you'd like to share with our audience, that would be great. I'm going to stop sharing my screen here so we can see each other more easily. Would anyone like to jump in? I can start. Great. Thanks Crystal. I think starting this program, especially on throughout the training, building up the team. Before we go out and support our peers, we actually form a team and already peer support within our coaches. I think I learned a lot. Everybody bringing the hidden curriculum that we talked about encompass a lot of information in each one of the coach. Coming in brings our own experience and our own special interest or particular regions that were particularly great ad or know more about. And then it's more the sharing and learning things. And kinda building this hidden curriculum more well-rounded within our system as well. And especially, I think this is a great team to really grow. It's everybody focused on mentoring, focused on coaching, then it's a very safe environment. And nobody is really immune to impostor syndrome. Like a lot of people at Princeton, I believe at a lot of other institutions have been here in the coach, In the coach team. I think it's very safe for me to share anything and share any insights and talk about any of our thoughts. And also let the imposter syndrome kinda be tucked away a little bit more. Great. Thank you. Suchi you looked like you were about to just jump in. Yeah. Yeah. The one thing that I wanted to add was through this program, I felt like in the beginning, after reorganize our curve, activities together with the coaches. The important thing that we learned from the oldest activities in the trainings that we're not alone. And we went through all these problems and we experienced all these problems together and figure out how to solve the problems. And yeah, so the important thing that I learned from the training was I was not alone and we collaborate to thrive together. Thank you. My favorite biggest lesson for me was I shouldn't feel responsible to solve all the problems, problems and everyone's problem. This was not quite intuitive to me to begin with because I, my background is in engineering. We are trained to be problem-solvers with solving technical problems. So often that seeps into my social life. If someone comes to me with a situation or a problem or something, my instinct would be to find a solution and the solution to that person. And two other group coaching process, I think I have to rebuild my thinking and instincts as to not just give them solutions or solve problems for them, but to help them solve their own problems. To be, as I think Laura mentioned in the slides, be thinking about that because people are more capable of solving their own problems than I am, because it's step up and it also gives them a sense of achievement and fulfillment if they're able to do that themselves. So for me, it was quite important to take a step out and not be an active role in solving these things when coaching, but to help them discover themselves and find a solution. Thank you. We have a question in the chat and I think it's a great one and so I'll pose it to you all now, we've been talking about hidden curriculum and I wondered if one of you, or perhaps all of you, could give an example. Either from your own experiences as graduate students or from an experience working with the coachee. What is hidden curriculum? What can it look like? I can start first-generation graduate students. So I come from a background that I did not have any knowledge of what people do and gadgets to these studies. So even the concept of writing papers, I didn't know. That is how you actually express your research. Like you spread your research, those things. And when you come to graduate school, when you're doing a PSD, what are the things that are important? At some point you realize, okay, I need to write papers, but is that the only thing I'm doing? Am I doing? Then there was a point where I was like, every research, every experiment has to be successful because anything that is not successful, it's not good. It took me some time to realize the whole point of grad school, especially experimental research, is you feel quite often, you feel much more than you succeed, right? And it's not, it's, it's, you're not supposed to hide those things that fail. So there were a lot of things and then how to maintain my relationship with my advisor. As an international student. We have a different kind of relationship with our teachers back in India. But here things are different. Like can I, can, I like not argue, but like can I, in some ways talk back with my advisor if they are expressing something, can I put my own opinion which may or may not be same as theirs and how to navigate through those things. And am I allowed to do that and things like that. So this is just a few of a lot of different issues that come up when you have never been around, some of which we in fact series Sue-Je or Crystal, did you want to add anything examples over the hidden curriculum? Yeah, I can talk about the hidden curriculum. So I can talk about the hidden curriculum from department and we put perspective. So as Laura said, Princeton has a various departments and various department has their own hidden curriculum. So if you were part of a humanities, which I'm part of, their expectations might be very different from those winnowed from the engineering or social sciences. And, and especially I am an international student, so I was not sure how I should fit in, how I can fit into those curriculum after I came to Princeton. So for example, we have a department, the department perspective. They have like workshops that they expect students to attend every week. And I was not sure if I have to go on and on. But I figured out that a lot of professors, they see that their grad students are coming or not. And then they kind of expect them to participate in workshops. Department activity can be hidden curriculum. One of the examples that the current hidden curriculum. Also, there are a lot of challenges and hidden curriculum as you become like a second year, third year for State grad students. Like you have to think about how you take the courses and what kind of courses and you have to be. You have to consult with your advisors and how to select those courses and how to select the committee members. Those are all the hidden curriculum that the department doesn't they don't share with openly share with the class students. So yeah, I can yeah. Thanks. I agree. I agree on a lot of the kind of communication and also interruption with your advisor, faculty member, or even broadly with other peers. And their varies among departments, even varies among different research groups. And I think we're relying heavily on micro environment that we're in with a lavish like if you have a very nice environment in your lab, you might be able to get a lot of great feedback and advice from other people. But if you have memorialize, people only care about their own business and then it might be harder to have to foster better communication and getting more information. So I think initially when I coming in, it happened three of us are all international students. I think coming in grad school. A lot of the barrier or not sure, certain information are certain topics. If it's okay for me to talk directly to my advisor. And then the concept we're talking about, mentoring up, kinda setting expectation with your advisor instead of waiting to get assigned and waiting to be validated in the end and the beginning. I thought a lot of these are due to the cultural difference. Maybe I'm from a different culture. But then I realized, actually for some of us students, depending on people's personality and even in the US with their backgrounds, people can actually have similar thoughts as what I think that, Oh, if I want to change a certain relationship with my advisor, but if if it's still okay to open up the conversation and if there'll be other awkward consequences that would actually backfire and influenced my future and et cetera, et cetera. I think a lot of these needs peer support and also needs university level of guidance for students that how to foster this communication and also tell everybody that is totally okay. And then it should be encouraged for each students to communicate to their advisor and to people that work with in terms of expectations. Absolutely. And that's a perfect bridge to another question we have in the chat from Caitlin Nicole Hunter Cox. Thank you. I'm Calvin writes, I coached doctoral students fairly regularly and I see how important faculty student relationships are for their progress to your point Crystal, both good or bad. What challenges have you all seen in navigating these relationships with your coachees? As you're thinking about that, I'll just add. As an aside, I also coach students and meet with doctoral students. I would say that of all the topics that come up, the relationship between student and the advisor is the number one topic that students are bringing to conversations. Things like Hi Management and navigating exams are common as well. And other things like perfectionism and pushing against procrastination. Trying to manage your own feelings of imposture, stress, et cetera. They're all also common. But I think, I would say from my experience, the number one topic is relationships with advisors. So with that in mind, crystal and Sue-Je, do you have any other thoughts or comments about your work with coaches and enjoy your own experiences? Navigating advisor, advisee relationships. I think in my experience, there's no one right answer to be had when it comes to having a good relationship with your advisor, because it all depends on what kind of person that advice rates and white what kind of person they advise is and what kind of working style they have. Starting from just my lab group, I realize that my advisor is quite laid back. He is he does not micromanage us. And so it's much easier to have a more open discussion with him whenever we want to, rather than a different lab group, they're a professor is like micro-managing and telling everything in which case. Strings can't really speak their own mind because they are being told about everything. So I guess in this case, it's more about how can you make the entropy is disjoint to realize what kind of person they are, and to study a little more about what kind of person who their advisor is. And then based on that, what is the best approach to take and to better their own relationship? Because as a third person, you never know you're not seeing those relationships. So you can't do need advice in any way, has to have the approach. But the best approach, in my opinion is just two. Encourage the students to figure it out themselves. I think that is a big part going forward in your doctoral studies as to understanding what your own needs and goals are. What do you want to achieve out of the total study. And then to interact with your advisor and in a way that is fulfilling to you and it's good for achieving your goal. Crystal or Suchi, did you want to add anything about navigating the advisor advisee relationship? There? So there are a lot of them, they're a lot, definitely a lot of challenges and Each advisor have their personality. You just students have personalities. Some people are better at open up, just forefront to have the conversation. Somebody are more withholding, kinda neat to weigh in the situation before they really take actions. I don't I don't think there's a great solution to all of these. And I definitely second, what might've said about creating personalized, more or less solution, quote unquote solutions for students. That they need to be comfortable in terms of whatever in the end what they do. And something that I want to mention as actually, you can expect your thesis adviser to be the great mentor, the perfect mentor for anything on some of the aspects in grass, like in grad school life. They are actually a lot of other opportunities to find mentors. It doesn't, maybe on some of the research part, you need to rely heavily on our thesis advisor, but on some even research related more general skills and other things, professional developments and live navigating relationships with other people there a lot of other mentors that people can find. It could be other faculty members in a department that are more open to talk about mentoring. It could be, it could be a friend's movie appears like the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning at Princeton for resources. I can also add some perspectives. So I also had a coachees who are struggling from the relations between advisee and advisers. And those kind of topics were not related to just about the advising styles, but also like how, how do you send certain emails to the advisors or know a few divisors can be offended because of this e-mails or not. Or sometimes you want to do want to attend as such and conference, but your advisors will need to go. You don't want to say, say, don't want to go. It can actually kind of like you don't want to destroy any kind of expectations from your advisor. So there's a lot of topics that I had dealt with, horses, crystal and might've said, there is no single answers to those relations. But I talk with my coaches that when whatever they do, it has to be, it has to make them feel comfortable. And then we start about how what actions would you do to make you feel comfortable. And then we start the conversations from there. Then, as might've mentioned, and then we start to develop any solutions together. Not just about me advising my coaches to like to do this and to that, but let them figure out how they feel comfortable. They feel comfortable about and and through those conversations also, I am learned a lot because I also had a stroke. I mean, my own feelings about the relations between my Solve and advisors. Especially you have a large committee members and how to deal with the committee members. They're kind of different perspectives on your dissertation, certain things. So yeah, I learned and I talk about my experiences with my coaches. And that also gives them You Ben feels comfortable to talk more about their relations. Yeah. I just wanted to add here that one of the concepts, what about the genesis of our program when we are thinking about it was the idea that exactly as you just said, Sue-Je, students, we thought we'd be comfortable disclosing and talking through many of these issues with peers in a way that makes the qualitatively different from their interactions with their comfort levels. Certainly with their faculty advisors, but also even with somebody like me and I coach as well. And I like to think that it can be beneficial for the coachee's, but frankly, I'm not a graduate student right now at Princeton. I don't have that lived experience. And so you all, just by virtue of being the people that you are near or near peers you have that lived experience that I think is incredibly valuable. And so that was one of the things we hoped to do with the program. I believe it's largely been successful in students. Students have been asking to talk to other students for lots of good reasons. Okay? So we've talked a little bit about some of the lessons you've learned as coaches. And I wanted to see if we can now expand the conversation. Oh, yes. Thank you. Perfect. Just roads. I was about to talk a little bit about training. So West wrote in the chat, I'm curious about the training you receive. What elements of the training stand out as particularly helpful and how prepared do you feel for your first cocci interaction or maybe any cocci interactions? So thank you, Wes, I didn't I didn't pay him to write that. Training. What has stood out and what's been most most helpful or perhaps not helpful at all? My toe, I think. Yeah. I think so. Well, the first thing was to learn a lot of these concepts. Concepts about how to be a good coach, what things to keep in mind and how to interrupt. But they were in some ways an accountable gets us up is the best part for me was we actually got to practice everything with GOCE. One of our members would like just pretend to be a cocci and would come up with a situation and that would actually interact with them, how we would interact with an actual cocci. And I think that in some ways helped me bring everything that I've learned together and to actually see how I can use it. And not just have those as a bullet points in my mind, but in an actual interaction how to use those those things that I've learned. And we had multiple of those. And we continue doing that even now, just to keep ourselves strained in some ways and to practice the skills that we have learned. Those, those training sessions where we actually acted as coaches. And the best part was the feedback that we got from the coachee themselves. And maybe if there's someone else just watching to see how things progress. And those feedbacks we had really great. And I could really work myself and try to better myself in terms of patient feedback on the feedback I got. Thank you for sharing that. Crystal. Yeah. I think practice is definitely really instrumental to all of these. Kinda associated with other concepts in coaching is about, to me, it's about one listening to asking questions. Asking powerful question is about gathering more information before I jump into offering advice. Because my first-ever session with students was even after practice, you still, without any experience, you still feel nervous going into that environment. And I remember on the students was talking about the situation and everything. I was like, NO quick. I asked for some questions and gathering some information. But very quickly it kinda because of the nervous and feeling of an awkward in that situation, I was very eager mentally to jump into offering solutions, offering options that maybe you can try this, you can try that. Perhaps in the end the ceiling could find useful information out of these. But then it's more of a, I think in the end it's more of a forced conversation that I'm, I'm dumping a lot of solutions. I'm dumping a lot pathways in front of you for you to choose. And then after practice with other coaches and the team and also having a few more sessions with different students. Now I'm becoming more comfortable of sitting back. And then before I offer it anything that you can try this, you can try that. I actually dig more into what they've tried and what kind of things that they liked or naughts and about their personality. And I would also before saying, you can try this, had also asked for their reaction, like, I raise up a solution. Would you find this and do like this? Or do you find this interesting, or just like so. And then we can change things and Taylor, Something more personalized. But the student Yeah, I also agree with crystal and Lido that the practice was the most important part? So before yeah, I remember that. I was not I was very nervous and my first coaching session and I tried to give as much information I could, but I don't think it was fairly helpful for my coaches because they feel like they should have done this or done that. So it wasn't really helpful. And after the practices, I realized that to delete the conversation, but let them figure out their own solution. That was the most important part. So I listen as much as I can and I ask them some questions such as, what would you do? Do you have any ideas? Like what kind of steps that you want to do? And they, they talk about several things and they started to figure it out. Maybe I should do this **** up to that. And then that's when I brought bring my experience. If I had something very similar to the coaches head. And then we build up some like develop the conversations and the more constructive results. So the practice was the most important thing, I think. But thank you for sharing all of that. And thank you, Wes, for that. Important to enrich question. So we're hedging toward this anyway, but I wanted to just open up the conversation even further and continue to invite your questions. But I'm curious about potential outcomes or effects for you. Even beyond graduate education. As a prelude, I shared with you all that Sue-Je is about to become Dr. Hahn if all goes well on Tuesday, which it will. But she also has secured and accepted and assistant professorship at an institution in Texas. So as a humanist, no less. So. Sue-je, I guess we could start with you and I guess we could link the question, what, what might you be able to bring with you beyond your experiences like Coach at Princeton to your new role as an assistant professor, which I think starts in about a month. We actually have to start in two weeks. So especially this program was really helpful for me to secured a job. I have to be very thankful to Laura and on the cross and through because I brought up my coaching experiences, mentoring experiences when I did my interviews and it was really helpful. And when I had conversations with students, I figured out that my new institutes, We'll probably doesn't have any kind of like a coaching program. So I would love to, if it's possible to build up this poaching program, if it is possible in my new institute. And I wanted to talk about it with them, about it with faculty and steps in the near future. So that maybe ideas borrowing from Laura idea. Because i'm, I'm going to be an assistant professor at a liberal arts college. Undergraduates can be a peer coach to their undergraduate peers, so that kind of a program can be promoted. So I'm still thinking about that because I I got I was very received a lot of things from through this program. I didn't even know that you were thinking of bringing coaching to your new institution. Yeah. I'm very pleased, which is probably not a surprise. And if you do, I would encourage you and everyone here in the audience that we keep, keep in contact with each other so that we can share resources and lessons learned. Hooray. The culture of coaching is expanding as we speak. So crystal, or how about the two of you? I know that you have about a year probably until you complete your degrees and then go off to wherever you end up. What do you think you might bring with you that could be helpful in your future lives personally or professionally. I think having coaching also in terms of the topic that we go through in the training and then also the information we talk with students. I think tremendously helps me in terms of thinking about mentoring students. And mostly it. So right now we sometimes do teaching assistant in a chorus and then we sometimes mentor junior grad students, even mentor undergrads as they have their first ever research experience. I just had one undergrad finishing her internship this past week. And I think a lot of these, a lot of the skills and contexts that we learned throughout coaching. I'm also trying to bring those into my relationship with other grad students and undergrads as well, especially for the close relationships, one-on-one mentoring within the lab. I think I personally, I tried to bring in the concept of balance. I wanted to show them, I want to be an example for them and show that you don't have to be a work colleague to be a great researcher. You could have a very balanced life. You could develop other hobbies. You could have relaxation at times, as long as kinda figure things out and have a great schedule and management of your time and energy. I think I'm trying to create a different environment if, if the advisor is being two or colleague, I kinda tried to use myself as sample and also in part some of the balance concept into their minds as well as they start to build out their own life as a researcher. Thank you. So when I was going through the closing process, I was looking at these concepts not just as a coach, but in general how it can affect me as a person. And what I realize is a lot of these skills are very translatable. So in a way, the biggest one that I realized was how to be a good listener. And I did not just use it and invite my coaching. But in general, in live link with your friends, with your variance, with your family, with your relationships. And how it leads to a much more fulfilling and a deeper conversations with others. And how it can make others feel so much comfortable and how like a safe space when talking to you. So it's not just find these skills useful and coaching scenarios, but when I'm talking to my friends and just other graduate students are just my lab mates. And how can I be thoughtful about what I'm saying, how my words can impact others and things like that. Because we're going to be a coach, we are choosing my words very carefully. We can also do that outside the coaching scenario, right? The one other thing that I surprisingly realize as I can sometimes act as my own coach, and what it does is it helps me separate from the thing that I'm feeling. So a few days ago I realized I was walking home from my office and I was feeling a bit overwhelmed. For a moment. I realize I stepped out as an actor, it as my own coach. And what helped me was I started seeing those scenarios that was creating me like the feeling of overwhelming feeling was I was able to separate from those things and almost look at it from a third person's perspective. And that kind of gave me a perspective that helped me understand what I was going through and how I can overcome that feeling and things like that. So I think not just use all these concepts that we have. Amazing concepts like life lessons that we have learned in the coaching scenarios, but use it outside with other people and with yourself. Because if you feel better about yourself, you will create a better feeling about what others. So yeah. Thank you. I'm just I'm just looking for so Kathleen Shea Smith, you just wrote in the chat, might Oh, I agree. I've incorporated these skills in so many areas, especially in parenting Here, here, Yes. Yeah. My kids didn't have chores. They had action items which we still lack about. So thank you panelists for sharing some of your thoughts and experiences. I have 403 on my clock now, so we have about 1012 minutes left. I guess. I wanted to just open it up further and invite all of you to ask any of us any additional questions you have about our program, its genesis, its current incarnation, and or questions specifically for the coaches about their experiences as coaches. So the the time is yours. Anything else we can tell you? Is it okay if we just unmute and jump in, please? Yes. So thanks for that, everybody. This has been really helpful. So little contexts. So I am an academic coach in Massachusetts. And my role is specifically PhD focused, which has been really fun. So thanks Laura for making this session happened. It was really cool to see grad students represented and we check this year. So I'm curious because I've been floating around on my own brain box recently about forming a similar program. And so I don't know, I'll have to get a lot of my own executive functioning put together if that's going to happen. But I'm a little curious, particularly from your perspective, Laura, as well as the participants. But any stage wisdom for how to make a program like this kinda, kinda happened and become Coke Zero. Yeah, well, I don't know if these are words of wisdom, but I can tell you, tell you about my experience. I'm housed in our Center for Teaching and Learning. And so I had the incredible opportunity and benefit of being starting a new job. I started this role here. There'll be five years this upcoming month. No, four years, excuse me, I'm entering my fifth year here. It was a brand new positions at our Center for Teaching and Learning. And the idea behind it was come into this role and develop a program or programs to support our graduate students. So historically, our CTL has had, as the name implies, a teaching arm and alerting arm. But for 20 years until he arrived into the new role, the learning arm really formally to support our undergraduate students. And my incredible colleague Nick Vogue runs and continues to run very robust program. He is our Senior Associate Director. And he works primarily for and with undergrads. And really, it was his insight and his voice who said, Hey, maybe we should be doing this for grad students too. And that he was able to recruit colleagues who sort of got on board. And it was many years of, I think, advocating for a new position to do this. So that's kinda the backstory that there were folks on the ground who noticed that there was a gap in services. In addition to grad students kinda finding their way to the undergraduate focused services and participating in them anyway, even though they weren't specifically designed for grad students. So all of these things came together and created a gap or a need. And the powers that be, if you will, eventually took note there were some resources put into hiring somebody. I was that lucky person. And then the real challenge became, okay, well how do we support 3 thousand graduate students, half of whom are international, etc. etc. etc. So we do other things in addition to coaching, we run panels like this. We have in-person and virtual workshops. We offer seminar series for dissertations and one called learning mentoring to help grad students and postdocs and stem specifically become mentors. And those are just a couple of examples of different types of services that we have food for grad students to navigate their time with us. But the coaching in particular, we just decided I started doing it individually for a year, not knowing if there would be an uptake. And a lot of students were interested in Cane. And frankly, I think it was particularly appealing to those students because I'm not housed in their department, in any department. I might housed in the Graduate School. I'm not a graduate assistant dean. I'm housed in the Center for Teaching and Learning. And so it's very clearly a different office in a different building and a different space on campus. And so that was a big lesson learned for me early on, that students feel safe or safer, at least coming to this other space. And because the demand was so high at that time, this was also pre pandemic. And because I see the value of peers working with peers, we wanted to pilot program for and by grad students. So it was really just ideas and trying it and piloting it. And then I wrote some proposals and got some grant funding. And that's what allowed me to hire, to recruit and hire our first cohort. And now we have two cohorts of students and it's just grown from there. Does that answer your question? Yeah. And I think the second part because I'm also curious to hear from the three of you folks for students, like it sort of begs the question, why did you choose to do this thing as grad students, like what stood out to you, where you're like, Oh, I want to try out the coach and see how that goes. I think I can jump in there. Lot of things that I wanted to know if my first, second years, but nobody told me to do that. And I learned a lot and I had a lot of mistakes. And I learned a lot. So I wanted to give it back to my friends and peers. That was the main regions for me to join the program. Crystal. And why do you guys agree? I guess it's the same feeling in my first just to give us a height to go and ask so many people who bought so many experiences like what should I do and things like that. But 30 or so, I started giving something back. I am also meant in my department and I was also doing some things like this. And when I saw this opportunity, I was like, the thing that came to my mind was, why not like this is an amazing thing, like we need it. I'm already doing something like this, but in a very unstructured way. Why not do it in a more structured way, in a way which can pay for it. Both me and others, much, in a much better way. I saw this opportunity and I think I was in the second cohort, so I might have talked to someone in the first part. I think I might have talked to Christian. I knew her before and it just appealed to me. This was such a great program that it almost begs the question, why would something like this not access already? Like it, it's such an intuitive thing like that should be a program like this. I was like, Yeah, sure I want to begin. Yeah, I agree. I i'm I'm pretty lucky to be in a very friendly lab. I learned a lot from labmates and other grad students telling me about things and researched and communicating with our advisor and a lot of these. So I see a lot of the importance in the peer support and information among peers that kinda helping others through this. So first knowing this program would be happen and I think really excited and really exciting thing for me to interact with a more broader, broader range of students instead of just within our lab or some of the closer labs and the department, I get two talk to students from other department, from other disciplines as well. And also it's to me, there are a lot of these topics that I'm personally interested in. I connected it was Laura first by being participants in workshops and consultations and talking about all this information. And now this job is basically fulfilling what I wanna do as a hobby. Now I'm doing this as a job. And it's very, it's been a very fulfilling experience. And also being in a different ends of designing workshops and leading workshop for other students. Yeah, I think I forgot to mention that our panelists, other grad peer coaches, as Crystal just mentioned, design their own workshops now and facilitate them. And services continued to expand based on the coaches interests and they and their peers. And west, it looks like you have your virtual hand up. Yeah, I had one comment and then a question. My comment is I think it's just fantastic the representation of the different disciplines. So it's not just humanities, but if we have stem students as well as humanities, and it's great to also hear that little tidbit crystal that you get to potentially coach students from other disciplines as well. And actually that connects a little bit to my question, which is, what kind of impact do you all think that this has had on community? Because I imagine in a post-COVID with so much heart shifting to virtual or maybe continuing to be at least hybrid virtual. At least it is in our institution that there's lots of things or maybe back in person, but lots of other things that are still virtual. How difficult that might be for graduate students to try to find or build community within their graduate program or on campus and a wider sense, I'm just curious what kind of impact this has had on community-building. Either just within the coaches, the graduate students who are part of this coaching program, or if any, You've seen as far as building better connections are bridging gaps within the wider graduate community. That's a great question. Thank you, Wes, any of you want to jump in first? I should say that we recruited our first cohort, crystalline Sue-Je are in our first cohort and Mano isn't our second gourd. And at first cohort, we did our trainings in summer of 2020. So if you recall, lockdown happened mid-March and I was hiring recruiting and hiring in May and I think we started our trainings in June. It was unprecedented as as as it were. Suchi and Crystal, do you want to add anything? Community-building? I do find their actual challenges in getting people participate. And sometimes way to imagine people are eager to come together and have more interactions after COVID. But then sometimes it might be because of the physical location or the hybrid, hybrid style of the workshops. Sometimes it can be in person or over Zoom. And I think people are still kinda fine. Everybody sway back to the, I guess, pre pandemic style of socializing. But I think recently we've been having info fairs and have adding attractions to students. Kinda more of the advertisement and opening are to other people first and then continuing, building up workshops and activities for students and kind of gathering resources for them. I think it takes a little time for people to come back and gather more. But as long as we are continuing doing this, I do see that we're getting more and more participants in a lot of these activities, a lot of these events. Thank you for that, Crystal, and I see that it is for 15. Is it okay if we continue for another moment or two? If folks want to continue? Okay. And if you need to go right now, obviously, that's fine. You are welcome. Mary. Any other comments regarding community-building West as question either within our cohort or beyond it. I think some of the events that we have, also, we had this event. We had we brought in puppies and it got snacks and we invited people to come together and learn more about our programs. And that kind of, you know, if you see the same people in the same contexts and at different times that you kind of pick them. Like in some of his friends outside that event, you are more inclined to like interact. And especially in terms of like coaching, I think then we become more approachable. So in that way, it might be a really good thing to have. Not just even sounds like cocci, cocci, but like outside that as well. And I think that especially the puppy event, quite popular. I should add, and I guess this can be a closing thought or a question really. Well first I'll answer your question. Is the pure coach position volunteer or paid? It is paid because we've managed to get grant funding. What my hope is, what our hope is, and hopefully it can happen. The second image here is to make the case the Provost's Office, for some funds that will sustain the program going forward because it's been entirely funded through grants. Is it paid comparably to a TA or RA position? Yes. Yeah. So our grad students are limited to working a certain number. They can only work a certain number of hours above and beyond their fellowships. And I, we pay them as much as we are allowed to pay them, if you will. I think it's important to pay people for their time and energy and expertise. I believe in that deeply. And also the last comment I wanted to make is that as part of our evaluation for the program going forward, I think going back to your comment and question West, we would like to include some measures like pre and post-test measures that incorporate like belongingness scales. For example, for the coachee's as well as the coaches. Because we have some qualitative data. We've been doing surveys and talking to people than we have written testimonials and open-ended responses. But we'd like to add in some validated instruments to see. Is, are there any effects, at least within a person over time that are related to well-being are flourishing or sense of social connectedness. For example. I want to be mindful of everyone's time. We should probably wrap up. Thank you so much for your attendance and your attention. And most importantly, thank you, Crystal Sue-Je and my dough for sharing some of your experiences. It's an honor to know you and to be able to work with you and learn with and from you. And thank you, Wes as well for being our fabulous moderator. Absolutely. Thanks everyone for attending. Please be sure to the Lateran evaluation before you head out. And otherwise, we'll see you next year at the next check conference in-person. Thank you. Thank you.