Orientation

Graduate student orientation is an event that is useful for some people and useless for others. It gives a brief introduction and training on how to teach and interact with students. It teaches you how to plan for things in graduate school. It also informs you of services that the university offers to support their graduate students. This information can be helpful for some people, but it can be boring for people that already know or have experience with these areas.

The first important thing that orientation covers is how to interact with students and teaches you about privacy for your students. This is for you and the university to cover you so that you are not inappropriate to your students and that you are not sharing your student's grades with people that are not privileged to that information. If you have prior teaching experience from a career or being a TA during your undergraduate time, then the majority of this is a "well duh" topic. For those that have no teaching experience, which I found out is the common scenario, it gives them the important details so they cannot get sued or the university cannot get sued by students or parents. My university had a week of general orientation for all new graduate students (both Masters and PhD students), but then my department also held a week of orientation after the general to teach department specific information. Teaching is a very important part of being a first year at my school so the department spent a large amount of time teaching the graduate students how to teach. Again, if you have prior teaching experience, a lot of this information was stuff you already knew, but I found out that most people have no teaching experience even though they knew that they would have to teach while in graduate school.

Another important aspect of orientation was teaching you how to plan. Some of the information was ridiculous to me because I have always been good at planning, but the university and department gave us this information for those graduate students that may not be good planners. They taught planning for various things like how to manage your money, how to manage your time so you don't overburden yourself, and (most importantly) how to plan for the necessary steps to complete your degree. I think the finances and time will be covered by different blog posts so I will focus on the degree here. For a PhD (depending on the school) there can be a varying number of steps to obtain your degree. All schools that I know of at least have you do a program of study, orals, and your thesis defense. Some schools will also have qualifying exams or cumulative exams that must be completed before you can either do your orals or defend your thesis. The orientation gives you a rough timeline of when these things should be completed by and if your department does their own orientation, they will help you figure out which courses you should take to fulfill the department's requirements.

One final thing that you can get out of orientation is the services offered by the university. At the universities that I know of, graduate students get all the benefits that undergraduates have (access to gyms, health centers, etc.) plus some graduate exclusive perks. The graduate exclusive options vary greatly depending on the university. A lot of universities have been making changes to help graduate students stay healthy (physically and mentally) so schools, like mine, offer psychological counseling centers that are separate from the undergraduate ones. This helps to keep gossips from starting if an undergraduate saw their TA going to talk to a counselor or something. There can also be services that help mitigate conflicts or discussions. If you are having trouble with your PI or a fellow graduate student, these services can help to start the conversation in a manageable way and can even be confidential if need be. If needed they will also be present for all of the conversation to help protect both parties so the best outcomes can be achieved. I highly recommend learning of these options and keeping them in mind just in case you need it one day.