Monday 12/14 will be our last Couch Convos meeting of the quarter! The Student Recruitment and Retention Center has a grant that provides funding for organizations and campus departments planning programs that support and promote outreach and retention to students of historically underrepresented, low-income, or educationally disadvantaged communities.  In our meeting we are hoping to discuss issues with retention and recruitment in our graduate group, as well as approaches for improving it through the use of grants and other funding sources. Some ideas that have already been suggested are videos showing a day in the life of a horticulture and agronomy graduate student, and hiring a web developer to design a retention and recruitment page for our graduate group website. We look forward to hearing and discussing more ideas!

We will join the zoom meeting at 5:45 for some chit chat and catching up, with the formal meeting beginning at 6 pm.

Here are some background information for the meeting (not required, just here for those who are interested). This is a broad topic, so feel free to look around for or suggest more resources!

• Some resources UCD has: https://srrc.ucdavis.edu/about
• In case you missed the email from Casey Raubach or Valerie Eviner, Troy Magney led a group in the Plant Sciences DEI Accelerate program that developed a set of steps to enhance DEI in teaching (files attached).
• A recent article with many useful references and information on actions that will revitalize the STEM pipeline. It’s only 8 pages. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867420312265