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M. Patricia Leuschen, Ph.D. |
Longtime UNMC faculty member M. Patricia Leuschen, Ph.D., was always invited to the university’s annual campuswide Alumni Day. However, she couldn’t help but wonder why she was always invited as a faculty member, despite the fact that she held two graduate degrees from UNMC.
“I’ve mentored or taught students in these other colleges and schools, but I’m an alumna, too,” she’d think.
Why was there no alumni association chapter for graduate studies?
Now, there is and Dr. Leuschen is at the helm, as the inaugural chair of the chapter’s board.
It’s the right time for such an organization, she said. It will increase a sense of community and camaraderie among students and graduates, as well as provide a means of support for the program at a time when traditional sources of funding are disappearing or changing.
“Most graduate students are really working as apprentices,” she said. “These are research degrees for the most part and, so, there isn’t a ‘class’ of 50 or 100 people that go to every lecture together for two or three years to build that kind of camaraderie.”
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“The graduate studies office has never held such events before,” she said “and the alumni association will now be involved as well.”
As well as building community, the alumni chapter will spotlight UNMC and the needs of its graduate studies program for alumni supporters.
“The changing funding mechanisms for graduate students are one of the major reasons this alumni chapter is so important right now,” Dr. Leuschen said. “In the past, NIH grants and a whole variety of mechanisms have been able to fund doctoral graduate studies on the UNMC campus. It is becoming more evident that this is not going to be as easy as it used to be.
“Graduate students, unlike some of the other programs on campus, almost always are in a type of apprenticeship program, where a particular graduate student is doing a research project, often for a number of years, with a particular mentor on campus,” she said. This system has played a major role in research endeavors on this campus and worldwide. Most UNMC graduates go on to do postdoctoral fellowships. UNMC Graduate Studies alumni could be an important resource in this transition, as well.
“If the ability to fund UNMC doctoral graduate students is decreased, because there isn’t assistantship money, that’s going to have a major influence on research,” Dr. Leuschen said.
“We felt that one of the places where we could begin to build new support is through our alumni.”
The alumni chapter is in the midst of a membership drive, and Dr. Leuschen said she expects that many graduate studies alumni will be pleased to hear of the new organization.
“I’ve been receiving requests for support from alumni associations from all of the other universities that I ever attended, as well as every university every one of my four children attended,” she said with a laugh. “The only place that I was never getting any kinds of requests was from the UNMC Graduate Studies office, where I earned — quite frankly — my two most important degrees.
So this was a gap that needed to be filled.”