So you were volunteered to be the Graduate Director...
What a great way to make your mark! You still remember your graduate days! You want to improve the rigor of your program, see students at seminars and listen to their questions! Develop new curriculum! Then the reality of what you need to do sets in, particularly after a few bruises from students, faculty, the chair, or the dean. I was the graduate director for five years and learned a few lessons of leadership and management in this position. Following attendance at an ACS Leadership Institute, I was asked to share some of my advice and lessons from this position.
Two main areas you need to know are your stakeholders and your responsibilities. These two items are intertwined. On the one hand, balancing the conflicting goals of your stakeholders with your responsibilities will lead to conflicts. On the other hand, gaining consensus and achieving goals can make them worthwhile. Who are your stakeholders? I thought this was a simple question to answer until I actually made a list. They include students, faculty in your department, possibly faculty in other departments, the chair of the department, the dean of your school/college, in some cases—including mine—the dean of the graduate school, and a university-wide graduate curriculum committees. Your stakeholders can be industry in your area that employs your graduates. Having a good grasp of your stakeholders' goals and understanding the processes they work under is essential.
As graduate director, my responsibilities include assessing and developing policies and curriculum, adjudicating student–faculty conflicts, recruiting students, and managing the budget for stipends and tuition dollars. If you do not like the status quo and want to make changes, it takes time to assess and develop the policies and curriculum for gathering the necessary data to support your changes. Gaining the support of the administration and other faculty may be difficult, particularly if things have been done a certain way for "historical" reasons. It can be very difficult to effect change without the support of the administration. Recruiting students takes time from your schedule and means interviewing and following up with applicants. Your university may have resources available, but a successful program depends upon admitting good students, which depends partly upon the graduate director.
Without a doubt, the role of graduate director will be successful if you have the time to invest. As a faculty member, you have to determine whether you can set aside that time in addition to your lab and teaching obligation. Delegation is one area of program management that makes the load easier. Does your department have an administrative assistant? Budgeting tuition and stipend dollars can be a headache. Will sources of funds change? Again, having an administrative assistant who also works with the departmental budget is invaluable, and I was lucky enough to have such a person. What I want to get across from my experience is for you to keep your enthusiasm and goals. However, you need to maintain a clear understanding of the players and issues involved. Communication and leadership skills as well as a working knowledge of the processes to be followed are essential. With all these issues, it was still a rewarding experience.
Matthew J. Picklo, Ph.D., was graduate director from 2004 until 2009 for the Department of Pharmacology, Physiology, and Therapeutics at the University of North Dakota. He is currently a research leader for the USDA Agricultural Research Service, Grand Forks Human Nutrition Research Center in Grand Forks, North Dakota.