Graduate School News Fall 2023

"Dissertation Spotlight"

"Accuracy of the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT) Obtained from Regional Weather Station Data for Agricultural Settings in Eastern North Carolina as Proxy for WBGT Obtained from Local Heat Stress Monitors"

Danielle Dillane

DrPh-Doctor of Public Health

Director, Jo Anne Balanay, PhD

Danielle Dillane’s dissertation project addressed the risk of heat related illnesses (HRI) to farmworkers in Eastern North Carolina. The research compared the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT) indices from weather station data (based on zip code) to instrumentation-based data obtained from locally stationed heat stress monitors to assess which index was more accurate for informing farmers of heat risk. Both indices were near equal in accuracy; however, the weather station data-based indices consistently had higher temperatures and may work to help protect farmworkers from heat stress. The project also included surveys with farm workers. Survey results indicated that more heat stress training is needed along with rest breaks, mandatory water, and a system for reporting and handling HRIs. This research study also led to the development of a 3-step process for handling heat stress and reporting HRI cases on a farm in NC.

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"Thesis Spotlight"

"Using Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) for Construction Verification, Volume Calculations, and Field Inspection"

Andres Leonardo Acero Molina

MS-Construction Management

Director: Yilei Huang, Ph.D.

Andres Leonardo Acero Molina’s thesis research compared Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) to traditional building plans generated from GPS to improve the surveying and inspection activities necessary in the construction industry. The outcomes of the research verified that UAS flights performed well with a “generally acceptable degree of accuracy for inspection tasks.” These technologies also provided high-quality photos for visual inspection later. Future research would include the use of other UAS technologies in other contexts.

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Three Minute Thesis Competition Scheduled for November 14

Three Minute Thesis (3MT™) is a research communication competition that challenges graduate students to present a compelling oration of their research in just three minutes to a non-specialist audience, using only one static slide as a visual backdrop. It is a great way for students to share their research with the rest of the campus community and the community at-large. We recruit “celebrity” judges such as elected Greenville and Pitt County officials, local television personalities, and other community leaders. These judges score the presentations on various characteristics, including the ability of the researcher to connect with a non-expert audience. Scores are tallied to declare a Grand Champion and a People’s Choice Award. The Departmental Cup is awarded to the department at ECU whose top three presenters have the highest combined score. The highest-scored presenter will represent ECU at the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools annual meeting on March 13-15, 2024, in Greenville, South Carolina. Our competition is being organized this year by Dr. Ron Preston, Graduate School Faculty Fellow for Student Development. He and other Graduate School team members are preparing an exciting event! Please join them on Tuesday, November 14th, at 1:00 PM in the Main Campus Student Center Ballrooms. More information is available on the 3MT website at https://gradschool.ecu.edu/awards/3mt/.

How Can a Faculty Mentor Encourage a Graduate Student to Participate?

The 3MT™ competition is an excellent tool for helping graduate students disseminate their work. Faculty can remind the students that any research project is eligible for this competition. Despite what the name of the competition infers, student research does not have to be part of the work for a master’s thesis, or even a doctoral dissertation or graduate assistantship assignment. Students conducting research within coursework, for example, should be encouraged to submit their presentation. Participating in this competition helps students develop important skills necessary for employment or when seeking research funding. Benefits include learning to share research results in an understandable way, reducing jargon when talking to others outside the discipline, gaining confidence when speaking publicly to a general audience, and developing overall oral and visual communication skills. We hope all faculty encourage their students to submit a presentation and take a chance at winning! Faculty mentors can review the 3MT website with students to show them previous presentations. Once a student sees our example videos, they often realize they do have the skills to participate!

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Dr. Ron Preston, Graduate School Faculty Fellow for Student Support

Barriers. Hurdles. Filters.

Barriers, hurdles, and filters – all of us in faculty-staff-administrative roles have encountered these in life, often to our great frustration. Our graduate students face these as well and they are threats to their academic success. Are these obstacles beyond our power to influence? If within our power, do we perceive that these barriers are necessary? If so, how do we help our students overcome them? If they are not necessary, what can we do to remove them?

The Graduate School, Graduate Council, and program directors and coordinators across campus wrestle with these questions and balance them with our primary desire – that we positively contribute to graduate student success at ECU. In the past few months that I have been working on student support in the Graduate School, I have had the opportunity to attend professional development sessions, work on key campus committees, and engage in individual and small-group discussions about how to promote student success. I suspect anyone reading this article is also keenly interested in this work and I encourage all of us to stay engaged in this arena.

The following examples list barriers to graduate education and what has been done at ECU to assess these obstacles and help students overcome them.

Barrier – Graduate School required entrance test exam scores, with cut scores, for admittance.

• Reality – Requiring test scores for admission presents an image of having high standards, but we had programs admitting students by exception (due to test score) and still performing well. Additionally, several national studies pointed to these tests having limited predictive power and many competitor schools had dropped test requirements.
• Action – The Graduate Council – at request of the Graduate Dean – dropped the test requirement from a Graduate School perspective, while allowing individual programs to have a test requirement.

Barrier – Impacts from COVID-19 and related restrictions.

• Reality – Students experienced enormous impacts: directly on academics, in their personal life, in their work life, etc. Faculty were forced to teach in new ways.
• Action – The Graduate Council – partly at the request of the Graduate and Professional Student Senate – provided a pass/fail option in courses for two semesters during the height of the COVID restrictions.

Barrier – The 2.7 admittance GPA on undergraduate coursework.

• Reality – Not all undergraduate students are well prepared to start their collegiate education. More recent and more closely related performance at times better demonstrates that a student is likely to be successful in a graduate program.
• Action – The Graduate School created an admit-by-exception policy that empowers programs to make decisions on admittance for student who do not meet general Graduate School standards.

Barrier – Student admitted by exception could not register for the next semester until completing the terms of their exception (typically a 3.0 or above GPA on nine or more hours). For part-time students, this typically restricted them for their next two registration periods.

• Reality – The vast majority of students admitted by exception performed well academically and gained the needed GPA for registration. However, this did not happen in time to get all desired classes, they incurred late registration penalties, and often encountered financial aid issues.
• Action – The Graduate Council – largely at the request of a program director – approved a policy that now allows students to register during early registration. If there is an issue with grades at semester end, these students are removed from classes for the next term.

Barrier – Students must maintain a cumulative 3.0 Graduate GPA

• Reality – Students face challenges on many fronts: personal health issues, family problems, financial stress, etc. and often do not make the best decisions for their academic success due to their concern over losing financial aid, compromising their graduate assistantship, or delaying their program.
• Action – We believe in this standard (barrier). How can we help put students in the best position to attain and keep this standard? We have safety net policies (course and term withdrawal up to the 60% mark for a term, incompletes, appeals policies), but need to do more with education about these as our students turn over, as do our program directors. Assisting students in challenging times requires teamwork – instructors who alert students that they need to withdraw, program directors who can work with the Graduate School regarding the assistantship, and students who will reach out to their financial aid counselor for advice before making a decision.

There are many more examples I could use in this article to demonstrate how we have addressed barriers, but these should be enough to make the point that colleagues working together can make a difference. It should also keep us ever watchful for barriers that still exist, that are beginning to emerge, and that will manifest themselves in the future. How will we address these? Consider the following and ask if your program (or graduate education, in general) could assist students in the following situations:

• Students dealing with pregnancy, childbirth, children, etc.
• Students who must stop out of graduate study for a semester or longer.
• Students who seemingly reach a program roadblock (e.g., thesis, dissertation, project).

Barriers. Are they necessary? If not, can we remove them? If they are necessary, can we assist students to get over or around them? If a barrier is necessary and it is such a vital part of the educational experience that students must navigate it with minimal assistance, do we clearly communicate that to students and provide second chances when appropriate? Are we promoting student success by addressing barriers?

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Highlights from Graduate Education Day

Graduate education at ECU was well represented at the General Assembly in Raleigh on May 23rd at the annual North Carolina Graduate Education Day. Held in conjunction with UNC System Day, the capital was abuzz with educational activity as Graduate Schools (public and private) and UNC System schools (and their Chancellors, select academic representatives, and school mascots) interacted with legislators and their aides.

The ECU Education Day delegation was highlighted by two students: recent nursing PhD graduate (May 2023) Angela Ciuca and Taylor Brown, MS in Human Development & Family Science, who has completed all degree requirements except for her thesis. Taylor’s mentor, Dr. Archana Hegde, was not able to attend, but Angela’s mentor, Dr. Linda Bolin, was present. The two students and mentor, along with Provost Robin Coger and Graduate School Faculty Fellow Ron Preston, visited six legislators over the course of the morning.

Each of the legislators (named below) had some link that ECU Legislative Liaison Karson Nelson wanted to highlight – ECU grad, interest in the graduate research topic, representative of Pitt County, or representative from the home area of one of the students.

• Representative Tim Reeder, Pitt County
• Representative Matthew Winslow, Granville County
• Senator Mary Willis Bode, Granville County
• Representative Gloristine Brown, Pitt County
• Senator Kandie Smith, Pitt County
• Senator Gale Adcock, Wake County

ECU graduate students each prepared a one-page handout for the legislators. They had a 2-3 minute synopsis of their research that they could modify based on the interest and expertise of the legislator. Brown’s research project was "Exploring Preschool Teachers’ Perceptions of Science Education." Ciuca’s project was "Perioperative Prediction of Surgical-Associated Acute Kidney Injury Utilizing Novel Renal Biomarkers." The ECU group is pictured below with Senator Adcock, an ECU nursing alumnus.

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Graduate Admissions Upcoming Events

We need your help! Our Graduate Admissions Fair is scheduled for October 25th in partnership with Career Services. This is an expanded graduate admissions fair and we are looking forward to seeing all of our graduate degrees and certificates represented. If you are interested in helping your program, please contact the Graduate Program Director to find out if they have already reserved their table. Also, please share this event with your undergraduate students! We are excited to help our students learn more about graduate programs at ECU and elsewhere and know many of them will benefit from this event. Please encourage your sophomores, juniors, and seniors to attend the event and get their graduate admissions questions answered!

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Dr. James Coker, Assistant Dean for Graduate Admissions and Enrollment Management has been working feverishly to help you recruit strong students into your graduate certificates and degrees. One new resource the Graduate School is offering due to Dr. Coker’s leadership are the Informational Webinar Series sessions. These sessions are designed to help prospective applicants and newly admitted students with information and support. When you review the titles, you will see that prospective applicants can get advice about writing a better essay and preparing application materials. Newly admitted students can get their initial questions answered in the “Admitted, Now What?” session. There is something for everyone! Graduate Program Directors routinely maintain communication with a department’s applicants and newly admitted students and are sharing these helpful sessions with them. If you are a faculty member who would like to be more involved in the recruiting and onboarding of your new students, please talk with your Graduate Program Director.

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Starfish Adapted for Graduate Courses starting Fall 2023

As we consider all aspects of enrollment, we must consider not only admissions, but our students who are currently enrolled in courses. The Starfish tool is available for all faculty for all courses; however, recent updates to Starfish have allowed us to adapt the referrals to be more specific to graduate-level courses. Starting in Fall 2023, you will find new prompts in the system such as “Support for written work recommended” and “Suggest Library Support Services.” While these could certainly be appropriate for undergraduate students as well, the Graduate School added these referrals with the unique nature of graduate courses in mind. This first adaptation for Fall 2023 is just the beginning. The Graduate School Faculty Fellows, Drs. Michelle Eble and Ron Preston, will continue to collaborate with the graduate faculty and the Starfish team to further adapt Starfish to serve the needs of the graduate faculty and their graduate students. For example, changes in the Starfish system can include specific kudos and flags for research-based courses such as thesis (7000) and dissertation (9000). These will help faculty document the progress of their students who are involved primarily in the completion of these important projects. We encourage all faculty to use Starfish for all their courses, both undergraduate and graduate, so that our students receive our positive feedback, notifications about concerns, and get reminded that the faculty care about their success.

Several times during the semester faculty will receive a prompt to complete a Progress Survey. We request that faculty utilize Starfish a minimum of three times each semester. Once received, please complete the survey as soon as possible. There is no specific “due” date, and the survey will be available until submitted. Once you complete a survey, you will not be able to raise flags/kudos again in this survey method until the next survey is released (see survey dates for the Fall 2023 semester below). You can always raise flags/kudos through Starfish>Students> My Students outside of a specific survey.

Fall semester Graduate School surveys will be

• Survey 1: Tuesday, September 5
• Survey 2: Wednesday, September 27
• Survey 3: Wednesday, October 18
• Survey 4: Monday, October 23, special release with a grade focus

The Starfish team is ready to assist faculty with individualized trainings and support. Contact the new Starfish administrator, Dylan Moore, for assistance at starfish@ecu.edu. Additional resources are available to support faculty use of Starfish at https://libguides.ecu.edu/EarlyAlertWarningSystems, by contacting the Starfish team at starfish@ecu.edu, or by contacting Dr. Elizabeth Coghill, Executive Director of the Student Academic Success Services office at coghille@ecu.edu.

Starfish Faculty Forums

Faculty Input Needed! The Student Academic Success Services office is hosting a series of faculty forums to evaluate and guide new faculty features to be implemented in the Spring 2024 semester. Forum discussions will help shape the Starfish system at ECU.

Faculty Forums will be held on Teams and facilitated by UAB Starfish consultant, John Kulak. Following each forum faculty will be sent a short input survey. You do not need to be a regular Starfish user to attend.

To register for one of the Starfish Faculty Forums listed below use Cornerstone Training or the link: https://eastcarolina.csod.com/ui/lms-learning-details/app/event/6196774e-1cf1-4d94-b4cc-46796a9011ec

• Monday, October 16, from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m.
• Tuesday, October 17, from 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
• Wednesday, October 18, from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m.
• Thursday, November 2, from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.
• Friday, November 3, from 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.

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Graduate School Committees

The Graduate School coordinates the meetings for the Graduate Council, the Graduate Council Executive Committee, and the Graduate Program Directors and Coordinators Meetings. These are open meetings and all faculty and staff are welcome to attend any of these virtual meetings. If you would like to participate, please contact Tania Alvarez at alvarezt@ecu.edu and she will be happy to send you the Teams link for the specific meeting you would like to attend.