August and December 2023 doctoral graduates are invited to participate in the Graduate College Doctoral Hooding Ceremony! The event will take place on Saturday, December 9 in the Foellinger Great Hall at the Krannert Center for Performing Arts. The focus of the ceremony will be the formal hooding of doctoral graduates by their faculty advisers. Participants must have successfully deposited their dissertations by 5:00 pm on December 1 to be eligible. More details and the link to register can be found on our event website.

Graduate Student Appreciation Week (October 9-13, 2023) is fast approaching! Join us for a special GSAW kickoff event on Monday, October 9. We'll be at Anniversary Plaza (that's the Quad side of the Illini Union) from 10 AM to 1 PM. Swing by for stickers, snacks, and selfies! We've got even more GSAW on our website, from free professional headshots for graduate students to a student parent meet-up.

In this first post from a new series on our GradLIFE blog, Claire Baytas (PhD, ’23; comparative literature) reflects on lessons she learned about the mentoring process during her time in graduate school: from thinking about the nature of a mentor in the context of grad school to busting the myth of the "super mentor." 

The final version of the Summer 2023 List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students is now available at go.illinois.edu/lotrae.

Worried about a friend, colleague or coworker? The Office of Threat Assessment receives and evaluates reports of concerning or potentially threatening behavior involving individuals who may be at risk of violence to the university community. You can always contact the team with the information you have. They will assess the situation and provide relevant assistance and support.   

Scared of the B word? Creating a budget can feel like you’re constricting your funds in a way where you can’t have fun, however, creating a spending plan will ensure you’re determining where your hard-earned money goes. Learn what drives our spending desires and find tools that work best for you to gain full control over your financial fears. Register here. 

Your graduate level tuition & service fee waivers may be taxable. Graduate level tuition & service fee waivers that are a benefit of employment are considered taxable income by the IRS. As a result, GA’s, PGA’s, & regular employees may see a reduction in take-home pay for the months of October, November & possibly December. Learn more on the Student Money Management Center website.

What do you need to know about money in college? How do you find helpful resources? Emily Harmon, a Financial Educator for Illinois Extension, will share invaluable resources regarding finances for college students. Top 10 Money Tips for College Students is a talk where you can come learn the answers to the questions and more. 

Many funding agencies require a personal statement in addition to an applicant’s research proposal. Why?! What on earth are you supposed to talk about? If these questions have induced writer’s block, this workshop is for you. We will assess the range of personal statement prompts you may encounter and distill their shared essence. Participants will learn the qualities of a compelling statement and practice writing techniques to arrive at a complete first draft. Please register in advance for this online workshop. 

Join us for an informative Fellowship Information Session on the American Association of University Women's fellowship, led by Dana Johnson, Ph.D., Assistant Director of External Fellowships at the Graduate College. Lunch is provided with registration. Please register at this link. 

Graduate students: attend this information session to learn more about HRI's Campus Fellowships program and to ask questions in preparation for the December 1, 2023 deadline.

Correctly formatting the title page of your thesis can be a challenge. Let us help! If you plan to graduate in December, submit your title page to the Thesis Office for review. We will check the formatting and your degree information to make sure you are on track! Just upload a copy of your title page on our website.

Elevator pitches are a dime a dozen. Strong elevator pitches are not. Whether it’s for an internship, job interview, or an academic conference, having a good elevator pitch can help you connect with others and get your foot in the door. Join the Speaking Center for this workshop to learn strategies for organizing and delivering a compelling case for you in this workshop. Please register ahead of time using the link above.

The Writers Workshop will review genre expectations for personal statements and provide examples from a range of disciplines. We will share strategies for drafting and tailoring your statement to each program. This virtual workshop is open to current U of I students, faculty, and staff. Please register with your University of Illinois email account by 11:59pm on 10/4, and we will send the Zoom invitation on the morning of the event.

Postdocs have access to one-on-one career advising with the Graduate College Career Development team. Our advisers understand the particular challenges and opportunities postdocs face during a job search and are available to help you explore career options, revise application documents, prep for interviews, get ready to negotiate, and more. We work with postdocs pursuing careers in academia, industry, nonprofits, or government. Learn more at https://grad.illinois.edu/careers/advising.

What can you ask for and how do you ask for it? After you receive a job offer, you have a short period to evaluate it, negotiate and make a decision. In this workshop, you will learn how to develop a strategy to help you know when and how to negotiate effectively. No registration required. This workshop will be held in person AND simultaneously broadcast online. Click here to join the workshop remotely.

For those in long-term relationships, the faculty job search presents additional layers of complexity and anxiety: balancing career and personal priorities, navigating competing career needs, addressing partner hires in negotation, and more. Join us for a presentation and Q&A on some crucial steps you can take to clarify your needs and understand your options. No registration required. This workshop will be held in person AND simultaneously broadcast online. Click here to join the workshop remotely.

In a world driven by data, the ability to navigate government statistics and data is a valuable skill. Whether you're a researcher, student, or simply curious, this workshop is your gateway to understanding the fundamental tools, resources, and strategies for locating and utilizing government statistics and data effectively. Attendees will learn about the major federal government and intergovernmental organizations' statistics and data as well as strategies to search for these statistical sources.

Web of Science is the widest-scoping, multidisciplinary platform of abstract databases for full-text articles, books, and conference proceedings. This session provides insight and strategies for getting the most use out of the platform. We will highlight how to search for literature and authors, as well as where to find citation and grant information. Additional features and strategies covered include: refining and managing search results, analyzing citations, and unpacking item records.

This session will cover conceptual design, storytelling techniques, and scriptwriting. Our goal is to set a strong foundation to help researchers understand communication in this popular, innovative format. We will have four subsequent sessions that go into more depth, but this first workshop is paramount to getting started!

Is this a good journal to publish in? Is it using predatory practices? Participants in this workshop will learn features to look for when evaluating publication opportunities in order to make an informed choice about where to submit research. Participants will also understand the utility and drawbacks of different journal ranking metrics as a way to evaluate quality.

Google Scholar is an incredibly popular and useful tool for research with several features that scholars may not be familiar with. This workshop will elaborate on the difference between searching in Google Scholar and academic databases, demonstrate how to use Google Scholar’s Advanced Search, explain how to connect your library access to Google Scholar, and cover some of the other more sophisticated features Google Scholar offers to support your research. We will also discuss some of the privacy concerns related to Google and how you can mediate them.

Curious to explore the relationship between people, places, institutions and how they change over time? Join us for a gentle introduction to network analysis. We’ll discuss basic principles for designing your own research project while playing with a beginner-friendly network analysis tool. No prior experience with code needed!

This session will give you insight and strategies for getting the most out of Scopus; the largest interdisciplinary database of peer-reviewed literature including journals, books, and conference proceedings, particularly in the sciences. This session will highlight how to find literature about a particular topic, reviewing author details, using article citations to discover more information, and evaluating sources. Attendees will have time to ask individuals questions at the end.Audience: Undergraduate or graduate students in any field.

Personal knowledge management (PKM) software programs are tools that you can use for organizing and understanding information through tools like linking, tagging, and network graphs. In this new workshop, we’ll explore the use of a free PKM software (Logseq) that you can use to organize, structure, and link text data for qualitative data analysis. Strategies presented in this workshop can be adapted for other PKM programs, like Roam or Obsidian. Attend via Zoom or in-person in Main Library 314.

Now that the semester is underway, take some time to reflect on your writing schedule and routines! This workshop will include tips for starting and maintaining a writing routine, cultivating effective habits, and forming a successful writing group. Dissertation and thesis writers from any discipline—and at any stage in the writing process—are welcome. This virtual event is open to U of I students, faculty, and staff. Please register with your University of Illinois email account by 11:59pm on 10/1, and we will send the Zoom invitation on the morning of the event.

Create the "write" habit! Our hybrid writing group provides graduate students with dedicated time to make progress on thesis or dissertation writing in a supportive atmosphere. Each meeting consists of a short goal-setting conversation, quiet writing time, and a concluding reflection and wrap-up. Use this time to create or return to a writing routine, make progress and meet deadlines on long-term projects, or jump-start a new writing project. You only need to register once with your U of I email to receive weekly email reminders all semester!

The HathiTrust Digital Library is the world’s largest, holding nearly 17.5 million digitized volumes from research libraries around the world. The HathiTrust Research Center, co-located here at UIUC and at Indiana University, is the research gateway to that enormous, near-universal library. This talk will briefly introduce the Center's text and data mining tools, which allow researchers to computationally analyze the millions of volumes of text held in the HathiTrust Digital Library.

The HathiTrust Digital Library is the world’s largest, holding nearly 17.5 million digitized volumes from research libraries around the world. The HathiTrust Research Center, co-located here at UIUC and at Indiana University, is the research gateway to that enormous, near-universal library. This talk will briefly introduce the Center's text and data mining tools, which allow researchers to computationally analyze the millions of volumes of text held in the HathiTrust Digital Library.

NCSA will offer a 2-hour training session where participants will work on exercises to parallelize model scientific applications using OpenMP, a shared-memory application programming interface. We will learn concepts and tools such as parallel loop scheduling, explicit data declarations, reduction clauses, and several OpenMP library functions. It will be entirely hands-on, with granted access to a supercomputing cluster. Register by 10/9 and find more info with the link in the title.

Need 3D Printing services for your course, research group, or for a personal project? Submit your next 3D print job to the IDEA Lab. You design it, submit it, and we 3D Print it for you. We also offer design consultations. The IDEA Lab is equipped with state-of-the-art FDM and SLA printers. Our lab services are available to all students, faculty, and staff at Illinois. Visit us online: idealab.illinois.edu

Join our guests, Drs .Carla Cáceres, Eva Fisher, Katy Heath, School of Integrative Biology for a lunchtime conversation on "Cultivating Intentional Mentorship" in grad school. Bring your own lunch, free beverages and desserts are provided. All grad students are welcome! Recommended resources to listen to prior to attending: Mutual Benefits: Constructing Great Futures Together (16 min podcast)

The EU Center invites high school students from the state of Illinois to take part in a translation competition featuring Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Swedish, and Ukrainian. Students will translate an excerpt from a work of contemporary literature from one of the six languages into English. Heritage speakers are welcome to participate. If you know any high school students from Illinois who may be interested, please direct them to http://go.illinois.edu/TranslationCompetition.

In honor of Graduate Student Appreciation Week, the Professional Portrait Lab will offer extended hours during the week of October 9th. The hours of operation are Mon., October 9, 3:30 – 5pm, Wed., October 11, 11:15 am – 1 pm., and Thurs., October 12, 9-10:30 am. Headshots will be delivered via a private secured email in 3 business days (during peak times delivery may take longer.)

The STC for Quantitative Cell Biology and IDEA Lab have partnered with the Urbana and Champaign school districts to establish Girls Who Code clubs at the International Prep Academy in Champaign and the Urbana Middle School to provide coding activities and role models to 6-8th graders in the Spanish/English dual language programs. We are seeking student volunteers to help serve as facilitators for each club this semester. This involves visiting one of the school clubs for approximately 1-2 hours every other week. Interested? Email cabada@illinois.edu.

Illinois 4-H is calling all 4-H alumni to raise their hands if they are “4-H Grown”! During National 4-H Week, we seek to identify 4-H alumni who grew up in the Illinois 4-H program. If you were a member of the Illinois 4-H program, you are one of 25 million Americans who share a unique bond. We hope you will reconnect with Illinois 4-H and register as 4-H alumni at the link above.

The University of Illinois has submitted our Bicycle Friendly University renewal application to the League of American Bicyclists (LAB). As part of the review process, LAB created this survey to get responses from the students, faculty, staff, and community members who are familiar with the bicycle infrastructure on-campus and like to bicycle (regularly or occasionally). We would appreciate it if you would take a few moments to assist by completing the survey. Your feedback is invaluable! Survey takes ~5 minutes to complete. This survey ends on Tuesday, October 10.

Dance at Illinois presents October Dance 2023 at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, October 12 to October 14. Prior to the opening night performance on Thursday, October 12, Dance at Illinois will host a panel discussion, moderated by Sara Hook, Head of the Department of Dance, with Martha Graham Regisseur, Elizabeth Auclair, and dramaturg, Betsy Brandt at Spurlock Museum at 6:00 pm. This event is free and open to the public.

The Irish-English composer Elizabeth Maconchy's hauntingly beautiful third quartet emerged out of the shadows of 1930s Europe. Carlos Simon’s heartbreaking Elegy memorializes the Black American victims of police violence, while Nathan Shield’s new quartet, Medusa, composed for the Jupiter Quartet for Shields’ Guggenheim Fellowship, explores the effects of various types of political and social violence.

Ryan Byfield is a Caribbean artist from the island of Jamaica. He and his band Nuclei perform original as well as cover materials. Byfield recently released his first album, Roots for the Culture, and is now working on a second project called "Renovation."

Learn about Cambodia through Mary’s personal journey as she discusses her Cambodian roots and shares more about her heritage and the history of Cambodia. Engage in a hands-on experience of making Num Kom, a traditional Cambodian dessert. Dinner is provided. 

Japan House's annual Fall Open House resumes on Saturday, October 14th featuring U of I alumna Linda Mosley, artist and teacher of ceramics and chado. Traditional Japanese tea ceremonies will be offered at 11am, 12pm, 1pm, and 2pm. At 3pm, Linda Mosley will be giving a free presentation about ceramics in tea ceremony. Garden tours offered at 12pm and 1pm. Registration required for all activities.

This study investigates the impact of institutional factors, specifically the introduction of Seguro Popular, a Mexican public health insurance program, on upward intergenerational transfers from adult children to their older parents. Using data from the Mexican Health and Aging Study (MHAS), covering years before and after the adoption of Seguro Popular, the research aims to answer whether public health insurance programs influence the financial and non-financial support older adults receive from their children.

Join us Wednesday October 4th at 5:30PM for the next edition of Chambana Science Café. Dr. Michael Miller will talk about his work and we can learn why raw and steamed broccoli taste different AND how that impacts your health! Join us at Cafeteria and Company in downtown Urbana (208 W Main St, Urbana). Snacks will be provided!  We hope to see you there!

Join the CGS team in welcoming Dr. Adil Najam on Monday October 2nd at 12PM for their presentation, "The Age Adaptation". Dr. Najam will examine climate change impacts, particularly on developing countries of the Global South who have had the least to do with causing the climate crisis but now find themselves at the forefront of its impacts. For a hybrid Zoom option, attendees must register at this link. 

Join us for a book club and conversation with the author! The WRC will be featuring Period: The Real Story of Menstruation by Kate Clancy. Explore issues  from bodily autonomy, menstrual hygiene, and the COVID-19 vaccine to the ways racism, sexism, and medical betrayal warp public perceptions of menstruation and erase it from public life. Limited free copies are available for book club participants.

Two graduate students will present their research at the next Beckman Institute Graduate Student Seminar: Md Saddam Hossain Joy, mechanical science and engineering; and Aravind Baby, materials science and engineering. The event will take place at noon Wednesday, Oct. 4 in 5602 Beckman Institute. Register to attend and receive lunch.

Please join us as for this special evening with U.S. Poet Laureate, Ada Limón. Part conversation and part poetry reading, the event follows Limón as she shares with us how poetry connects us to the world, allows us to heal, to love, to grieve, and reminds us of the full spectrum of human emotion. 

Join us for a talk by Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan, Nobel Prize laureate and Leader, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, UK, entitled “My Adventures in the Ribosome.” The ribosome is the ancient and enormous molecular machine that reads genetic information on mRNA to synthesize proteins. It took several decades to determine an atomic structure of the ribosome due to its complexity. This talk will cover his efforts to unravel its structure, his own career which involved living on three continents, and switching from his initial training in physics to carrying out research in molecular biology.

The Taiwanese American Students Club is proud to announce our annual Night Market! This October 7th, from 6-9PM, students can head over to the Main Quad for exciting performances, authentic street food, and fun games reminiscent of Taiwan’s very own night markets. Keep up to date with future Night Market information regarding our menu, performances, tickets, and much more through our Instagram, Facebook, and weekly newsletter.

Join us for a workshop led by Lovern J. Gordon, the author of "The Legacy He Left Me." This interactive workshop discusses how easy it can be to fall into an abusive relationship, what are the effects of being a child witness, what constitutes a healthy relationship vs. an abusive one, how to safely end an unhealthy relationship, and how to help someone in need. Please register here.

All Asian and Asian American Grad Students, join us for an exquisite Asian tea tasting experience! Here, you will be able to enjoy delicious tea pairings with Asian snacks and connect with fellow grad students. RSVP now to secure your spot at this unique event - https://go.illinois.edu/AAAGN_TastingAsianTea.

Indigenous Peoples' Day is a campus-wide celebration that begins on Sunday, October 8th through Monday, October 9th. Many units at our institution have collaborated this year, events will be spread out across campus. Visit this link for the full schedule of events, we look forward to seeing you participate!

All Asian and Asian American Grad Students, join us for an exquisite Asian tea tasting experience! Here, you will be able to enjoy delicious tea pairings with Asian snacks and connect with fellow grad students. RSVP now to secure your spot at this unique event - https://go.illinois.edu/AAAGN_TastingAsianTea. We look forward to sharing this enriching experience with you! Questions? Please email aacc@illinois.edu.

Join HRI for an evening talk/performance featuring Damon Locks (Chicago-based artist, educator, musician and leader of the Black Monument Ensemble) and Tara Aisha Willis (Curator in Performance & Public Practice, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago). This event is part of the Interseminars series for "Improvise and Intervene," supported by the Mellon Foundation.

Graduate students in the humanities, arts and related fields: you are cordially invited to join us for a casual, relaxed happy hour gathering on the first floor of Levis Faculty Center! Come and meet fellow students while enjoying light food, drinks, and convivial conversation.

Join us at the Phish Market! We’re kicking off Cybersecurity Awareness Month with carnival games that help you learn how not to take the bait with a phish. Win prizes when you spin the wheel of phish, play chum buckets and more!

McKinley Health Center serves on-campus students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The University of Illinois Counseling Center provides mental health counseling and well-being education for students.

If you or a student you know may need support with their basic needs or financial stressors, please reach out.