Thank goodness for grads…

Like many of you, we have wonderfully supportive alumni. Ours celebrate their connection with our school is many ways: while the financial support of successful old boys & old girls is tremendously appreciated, there are smaller but still significant ways that others contribute.

One such way is how I lean on many of our recent grads as touchstones for library programming. As you well know, it is critical that the skills we foster be relevant to their lives beyond our walls, and I am in regular contact with quite a few to keep what we do with library instruction in line with what is required of them at university.

The most recent example is not specific to the library. I have the good fortune to be teaching a section of AP Capstone Research this year and am running into an issue with students not meeting deadlines, and not requesting extensions properly.

A quick text to some grads gave me a plethora of real-world examples, which I will share with my class today:

  • First year Arts > one prof offers an automatic grace period of one week, after which late work results in a zero
  • Second year Engineering > extensions must be requested 1 week in advance (her class recently mixed up a deadline and ended up writing and submitting incomplete papers in a 5-hour period because they couldn’t request an extension at that point)
  • Fourth year Arts > one prof deducts 2-5% for every day late, another is more flexible because “he doesn’t want you to fail the course”

Far from a scientific study, but I hope these quick and timely examples will help some useful context for a serious conversation with my students – fingers crossed.

One thought on “Thank goodness for grads…

  1. Thank you for the insight, Shelaugh, and at such a busy time! I think a respect for other people’s times and deadlines is an important life skill to model and teach!

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