will help improve programs for 
future graduate students.

“The goal is really for us to 

try to better understand the 
doctoral student experience,” 
Gonzalez said. “We have lots of 
kinds of dry data (gender, race, 
and 
ethnicity 
information) 

about these students, but we 
don’t know, at least on a large 
scale, the details about their 
experience 
and 
how 
that 

changes over time.”

For the 2017 MDES survey, 

all participants were first-year 
graduate students from multiple 
disciplines. 
Researchers 

will follow up with these 
students each year to track 
how their experiences change 
as they approach graduation.
John 
Gonzales, 
director 

of 
Rackham 
Institutional 

Research, explained the study 
allowed researchers to obtain 
information 
from 
students 

beyond what was shared on 
their applications. Topics the 
questions 
explored 
includes 

the diversity of the student 
population, 
students’ 
prior 

experiences, and expectations 
for graduate school and future 
careers.

Because 
many 
graduate 

programs require students to 
complete some research during 
their studies, the MDES team 
was pleasantly surprised to 
learn 86 percent of the first-
year students had experience 
conducting 
some 
form 
of 

research at the undergraduate 
level.

“Often we hear a notion 

of how some students might 
be unprepared (for graduate 
school), so we ask about a 
number of experiences that 
people 
have 
coming 
in,” 

Gonzalez said. “Doing research 

is one of the big experiences 
that are critical in preparing 
students to go to graduate 
school, so we didn’t expect that 
number to be so high.”

Joslin Musick, a Rackham 

student 
studying 
molecular 

and 
integrative 
physiology, 

attributed 
her 
confidence 

coming to graduate school to 
her undergraduate preparation.

“I did feel prepared for 

graduate 
school,” 
Musick 

said. “This could have been a 
combination of my course load 
and my research that I had 
done during my undergraduate 
years.”

The Rackham Institutional 

Research 
team 
also 
asked 

students about their career 
expectations. About 72 percent 
of surveyed students pursuing 
a master’s in social sciences 
reported they wanted to teach 
after earning their degrees. 
Seventy-three 
percent 
of 

these students who chose both 

teaching and research reported 
wanting a tenure track position. 
In comparison, only about 43 
percent of surveyed students 
pursuing 
their 
master’s 
in 

the 
physical 
sciences 
or 

engineering 
reported 
they 

wanted to teach after earning 
their degrees and 46 percent 
wanted a tenure track position. 

[twitter:https://twitter.

com/laura_schram/
status/1043072757288845314]

Gonzalez 
explains 

these differences in career 
expectations between students 
of the natural sciences and 
those of the social sciences 
is most likely related to the 
nature of these fields and 
their 
corresponding 
job 

opportunities.

“This is probably a reality of 

the kinds of job markets that 
our students are expected to go 
into and the kind of available 
positions,” Gonzalez said. “So 
if you think about students 

of engineering, for example, 
and the biological and health 
sciences, 
they 
might 
have 

other opportunities in other 
areas like start-up companies 
... where they can go into the 
private sector.”

While 
natural 
sciences 

students have more options 
to go into the private sector, 
Gonzalez explains traditionally 
humanities and social sciences 
students tend to find more jobs 
in education.

“Social science students, the 

traditional pathway for a lot 
of students in these fields is 
tenure track faculty positions 
or government,” Gonzalez said. 
“So I think it kind of aligns 
with their disciplines and the 
expectations and realities of 
those disciplines as well as the 
markets that are out there after 
they graduate.”

Chen hopes he will have the 

same impact on his students as 
his teachers had on him when 

he was a young student with a 
budding interest in chemistry. 
In 2017, Chen even visited his 
high school chemistry teacher 
in Nanjing, China. His former 
teacher turned 100 years old 
last year and Chen gave him a 
mug with a U-M logo as a gift. 
Chen also came from a family 
with an academic background, 
so for him, working for a 
corporation was just not as 
attractive as teaching.

Currently, researchers are 

in the process of collecting 
data for the 2018 MDES survey. 
Respondents will respond to 
similar questions while in their 
second year in graduate school. 
The 
Rackham 
Institutional 

Research team hopes to glean 
new information from these 
students to help future classes. 
They also hope to reach out 
to a new group of first-year 
students 
after 
the 
original 

group of respondents earn their 
degrees.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
News
Wednesday, September 26, 2018 — 3A

business school, and I really 
liked that perception of it,” 
Jacobson said. “They really 
talked about social impact 
and 
nonprofit 
sector 
and 

things like that. That’s kind of 
what I wanted to do, and still 
probably want to do.”

After 
spending 
three 

semesters at the Business 
School, though, Jamie felt 
the culture there emphasized 
certain 
careers, 
while 

forgetting about others. 

“I 
felt 
very 
pressured 

to follow the typical Ross 
career path, whether that 
be 
investment 
banking, 

consulting or even marketing, 
and I’d say marketing was the 
least popular of the traditional 
business tracks people tend 
to 
follow,” 
Jacobson 
said. 

“There was always this, ‘Well, 
a lot of people don’t do the 
traditional recruitment and 
we support you through all 
of that.’ But all of the emails 
that I got and consistent 
talk about recruitment was 
all 
consulting, 
finance, 

investment 
banking 
and 

sometimes marketing. It felt 
very constraining.”

Jacobson 
acknowledged 

institutional 
programs 
for 

students 
pursuing 
social 

impact 
exist, 
but 
said 
a 

majority of Business students 
were interested in traditional 
career paths, which is where 
administration 
focused 
its 

efforts on.

“It’s really tough, because 

I think there are plenty of 
people like me who want to 
do social impact, and Ross 
does 
have 
some 
options 

there and some programs 
there,” Jacobson said. “To a 

lot of students who don’t end 
up wanting to do that, my 
perception of that is that they 
feel that all the social impact 
and nonprofit talk is kind of a 
waste of their time, whereas 
on the other side I never really 
intend to use accounting, so 
that kind of felt like not a good 
fit either.”

Business senior Liz Fawley 

also plans to pursue social 
impact work. While Fawley 
admits 
it 
can 
sometimes 

be difficult to not follow a 
traditional 
business 
path, 

she 
believes 
the 
Business 

administration 
is 
trying 

to 
offer 
opportunities 
for 

students like her.

“Our dean and associate 

dean are very pro-positive 
business and talk a lot about 
developing 
future 
business 

leaders to create a more 
positive future,” she said. 
“They really are passionate 
about this –– I really do 
think that it’s not just all talk. 
They’ve spent a lot of money 
on all the programs.”

According 
to 
Norman 

Bishara, associate dean for 
undergraduate 
and 
early 

career 
programs 
at 
the 

Business School, the school 
has over 100 organizations 
dedicated to social impact 
and 
nonprofit 
work. 
One 

such 
organization 
Fawley 

is involved in, Net Impact, 
combines students from all 
majors to create positive social 
and environmental change. 
Finding this niche within the 
Business School played a key 
role in her decision to continue 
with her field of study, Fawley 
said.

“One time this summer, I 

had to teach a Ross student 
what a union is,” said Fawley. 
“In Net Impact, everyone is 
on the same page. You can 

find your community within 
Ross, and that is one reason 
I’ve been able to stay level-
headed throughout the entire 
process.”

Bishara 
stresses 
while 

the Business School values 
positive 
business, 
the 

administration does not wish 
to force students into one 
career path or another.

“We 
are 
the 
positive 

business 
school 
and 
have 

been for a while now. More 
than other schools around the 
world, we really care about 
business’ impact on society,” 
Bishara said. “One thing I 
don’t really love hearing is, 
‘Ross wants this.’ There is no 
Ross desire for students, other 
than we want our students to 
be engaged, have good lives, be 
good citizens, be good leaders, 
and it’s not in a certain field or 
another. That’s not what we’re 
designing at all. Yeah, there 
are students who want to go 
in certain directions, and we 
want to support that, so we do 
that for any student who wants 
to go into any role. I think 
there’s tons of opportunities, 
and so if people aren’t finding 
them, that’s a failure in some 
way.”

Jacobson said while the 

two sides of the Business 
School each had strengths, 
but seemed to compete with 
each other rather than work in 
tandem.

“Honestly, 
I 
think 
that 

they’re in a very strange 
crux right now, where they 
have a lot of kids and a lot of 
alumni and just a lot of people 
expecting them to continue 
sending all these people into 
Wall Street and to continue 
developing really, really good 
business students for that, but 
then they also have this other 
goal of being a social impact 

business 
school,” 
Jacobson 

said. “And I think right now 
bridging the two identities of 
the business school, as being 
this 
elite 
institution 
that 

connects really big firms with 
exceptional, well-performing, 
passionate students, there’s 
that side of it, but there’s 
also the side of trying to 
develop a social impact focus 
curriculum, a social impact 
focused 
recruiting 
process 

and I think it’s really difficult 
for those two to connect.”

Business senior Mohammad 

Shaikh 
hoped 
to 
pursue 

positive 
business 
in 
his 

studies, but found the school’s 
curriculum did not live up to 
its branding of being a positive 
business school.

“I think that Ross brands 

itself as a business school that 
cares about positive business, 
positive business being defined 
as business working to solve 
society’s biggest problems,” 
Shaikh said. “If you look at 
their website, what they’re 
about, that’s how they brand 
themselves. What it looks like 
right now, it seems like they 
don’t really care about it. They 
sort of just weave it into their 
curriculum without making it 
central. It seems like the core 
business classes that you take 
at any business school are 100 
percent the central component 
and 
then 
impact 
positive 

business initiatives are kind of 
wrapped around very subtly.”

However, Shaikh believes 

Business School Dean Scott 
DeRue may change the culture 
in a few years.

“Anytime 
(DeRue) 
goes 

on anything, he talks about 
(positive business),” Shaikh 
said. “I do think that they’re 
working to make that a bigger 
part of their vision, because 
he goes on different trips, 

and this is his thing. I think 
that in future years, because 
he just started two years ago 
I believe, I think in coming 
years he’s going to hopefully 
carry it out.”

Jacobson 
thinks 
making 

it 
easier 
for 
students 
to 

double major would allow 
students 
pursuing 
social 

impact 
adequate 
space 
in 

their schedule to take the 
classes or electives they need 
to supplement their business 
degree.

“I felt like they’re telling me 

to be social impact focused, 
but then I’m focused mostly 
on getting good grades for 
recruiting, recruiting for a 
bunch of firms, to be perfectly 
honest, their main goal was 
not social impact,” Jacobson 
said. “As someone who was 
trying to do a dual degree, 
I didn’t have room in my 
schedule at all to take an easy 
class to inflate my grades.”

Shaikh believes the solution 

lies with a realignment of 
what society should value.

“On a larger scale, the 

smartest people in my class 
don’t go into the impact-
oriented 
careers 
because 

they’re not valued by society,” 
Shaikh said. “What’s valued by 
society? The positions that, in 
my opinion, contribute to the 
problem. That’s the problem. 
There should be an incentive 
structure that’s built up, such 
that if I’m someone who wants 
to go into a career that helps 
others, and I’m very smart and 
qualified, I should have a very 
clear avenue to that path. And 
in my opinion, even if you’re 
not 
someone 
who’s 
super 

passionate about impact, I 
think that the world demands 
that there’s more talented 
people in these spaces that are 
helping others.”

work with the structure of student 
organizations.”

Greene elaborated on the student 

liaison program, which he and 
CSG Vice President Isabel Baer, an 
LSA junior, created. The program 
allows student organizations to 
communicate and meet with each 
other through a CSG forum. He said 
the goal of the program is to allow 
for a more collaborative culture on 
campus.

“The idea is to really build 

that 
cross-student 
organization 

collaboration, but really tap into the 
ownership of our fellow Wolverines 
and into our campus community,” 
Greene said. “Because to me, it’s 
planting the seeds for the long-term 
investment that’s going to allow for 
the cultural and social shift on our 
campus.”

The meeting continued with 

community 
concerns, 
where 

two members of the University 
community 
talked 
about 
their 

boycott of Israel, relating it to Prof. 
Cheney-Lippold’s refusal to write a 
recommendation letter for a student 
to study abroad in Israel. After, CSG 
members nominated for certain 
executive positions were confirmed.

The representatives ended the 

meeting 
by 
discussing 
various 

resolutions, including one aiming to 
amend elected representatives’ office 
hours to make them more efficient 
and useful. LSA sophomore Benjamin 
Gerstein, an LSA representative and 
chair of resolutions, emphasized 
the importance of office hours and 
listening to community concerns.

“A lot of what we talk about and 

a lot of our goals on CSG is to be the 
mass representative of our schools, 
and office hours provides you the 
opportunity to hear perspectives 
other than our own on what is going 
on in our communities,” Gerstein 
said.

ROSS
From Page 1A

RESEARCH
From Page 1A

CSG
From Page 1A

campus environment. Sellers 
called for better cooperation 
between 
institutions 
within 

the University and more focus 
on developing the skills of 
minority faculty and students 
instead of just recruiting them.

“We, 
like 
many 
other 

predominantly 
white 

institutions that have had these 
relationships, have tended to 
think about them in a model that 
is more consistent with what 
happened in terms of the negro 
leagues,” Sellers said. “When 
we 
integrated 
baseball, 
we 

didn’t fully integrate baseball … 
what we said was we will let the 
talent play everywhere, but not 
the management. … We have to 
change that paradigm.”

Edmund 
Graham, 
the 

Minority Serving Institutions 
coordinator at Rackham, hosted 
a 
panel 
following 
Sellers’ 

speech 
that 
featured 
Dina 

Stroud, the executive director 

of the Fisk-Vanderbilt Master’s-
to-PhD 
Bridge 
Program. 

The program helps Vanderbilt 
University graduate students, 
specifically 
underrepresented 

and 
minority 
students, 

complete their master’s degrees 
and place them in a position to 
later acquire a Ph.D.

Stroud highlighted some of 

the measures the program has 
taken to better suit minority 
needs, including the need to 
tailor the graduate program 
to the students’ needs and 
career ambitions. Stroud also 
encouraged students to take 
part in committees pertaining 
to minority students and share 
their thoughts on how the 
programs can better suit their 
needs. 
Providing 
consistent 

mentorship and mental health 
services was also of utmost 
focus. Despite this, Stroud said 
the program’s efforts are met 
with massive obstacles. Stroud 
noted lack of funding from 
institutions as a key issue, in 
addition to problems with the 
application 
and 
acceptance 

process. 

“We have made the most 

progress in terms of holistic 
admissions… but we are still 
pushing back against GREs and 
numbers,” she said. “And I feel 
like we even took a bigger step 
backwards, actually, this last 
year when we … had no fee for 

our graduate application, and 
now we have a fee … It’s a push 
all the time.”

Stroud 
also 
pointed 
to 

systemic racism as a persistent 
issue.

“You get frustrated at times 

opening doors to a place … that’s 
still not welcoming all the time, 
and you have to tell them, ‘This 
is the systemic racism that you 

are going to have to encounter,” 
she said. “Are you going to get 
treated differently because you 
are at Fisk? Yes.”

The 
panel 
also 
featured 

Brian Beckford, a presidential 
postdoctoral 
fellow 
at 
the 

University 
who 
served 
as 

the Bridge Program project 
manager in the Department 
of Education and Diversity for 
the American Physical Society 
in College Park, Maryland. 
The Bridge Program focuses 
on 
increasing 
the 
number 

of physics Ph.Ds awarded to 
underrepresented 
minority 

students at Maryland.

Beckford 
stressed 
the 

importance 
of 
supporting 

diversity inclusion programs 
until 
academia 
is 
more 

inclusive 
of 
minority 
and 

underrepresented communities.

“These efforts are going to 

be continued, in my opinion, 
to be overlooked at times, to 
be unrewarded, to be under 
volunteered … and it’s going to 
fall on a specific group most 
of the time to continue these 
efforts,” he said. “Until there 

is a larger participation and 
until access to participating in 
academy is changed, I think you 
have to have these programs in 
place.”

Beckford called for the need 

to focus on sustaining these 
programs 
through 
funding 

and 
participation. 
Beckford 

specifically 
highlighted 
the 

importance of support from 
tenured 
professors 
when 

creating one of these programs.

“You 
have 
to 
(have) 
20 

percent at minimum tenured 
faculty that are willing to be 
involved,” he said. “If you are 
smaller than that, I think you 
are starting with one leg cut off. 
It’s just going to be new junior 
faculty. … It’s really hard to get 
going.”

Naomi 
Wilson, 
a 
Ph.D 

candidate at the University and 
President of Rackham student 
government, asked the panel 
how graduate students can play 
a role outside of recruitment 
in assisting minority graduate 
students.

Stroud 
responded 
by 

encouraging 
a 
student 

mentorship 
program 
for 

minority and underrepresented 
students 
and 
increasing 

graduate student involvement 
through 
activities 
and 

workshops meant to educate 
other students.

“You can do professional 

development 
type 
of 

presentations, 
you 
can 
put 

abstracts in some places to 
do workshops, or you can be 
designing some things … really 
start brainstorming as to what 
we want to see and how you can 
make that happen, and faculty 
listening to them when they tell 
you what they want to see and 
how you can help them make 
that happen,” she stated.

Beckford 
responded 
by 

encouraging graduate student 
involvement in the admissions 
process, and requesting review 
of 
the 
graduate 
program’s 

professional development.

“In part of your annual 

review… request to have a 
large component where there 
is a professional development 
component or something that is 
discussed,” he said.

DEI
From Page 1A

comes as the University has 
attempted to build its presence 
through conferences and years 
of partnership initiatives in 
Detroit, where the school was 

originally founded in 1817. Some 
of the University’s programs, 
such as Semester in Detroit, 
have also been problematic. 
Companies like General Motors 
and Quicken Loans have also 
made efforts to increase their 
presence in the city.

Grigsby asserts problems such 

as the city’s access to education 

are left largely unaddressed 
while business development like 
Columbia Street increases. She 
believes it is cause of concern 
for native Detroiters, who want 
to see their city grow and want 
to make sure Detroiters are not 
left behind.

“Along with the people living 

in Detroit, I don’t say there’s a 

revitalization because they’re 
only really developing some 
parts of the city,” Grigsby said. 
“In some parts of the city, people 
are having their water shut off 
because they can’t afford water, 
or they can’t afford to live where 
they are or they can’t afford to 
get the jobs or opportunities 
they need to succeed. There are 

things like that where they’re 
not trying to improve public 
services but instead trying to 
improve the parts of Detroit 
that they want to make look 
pretty. Midtown and Downtown 
are at least fine in that aspect, 
people are coming to games and 
promote the city. But you have 
to make sure the people who 

live there are taken care of first 
in my opinion.”

Grigsby 
suggested 
hiring 

workers from Detroit for the 
new stores in the development.

“You could try and get local 

people involved,” Grigsby said. 
“If they hire Detroiters, that 
could at least make a better 
impact on the city.”

MDEN
From Page 2A

“We have made 
the most progress 
in terms of holistic 

admissions”

