University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Case Study
Background:
I used to think that ministry to graduate students and ministry to faculty should be kept separate. What grad student could really feel comfortable with faculty power dynamics in the room or want the pressure to have to put on a professional face in the presence of their professors. And the faculty would be expected to feel pressure to mentor or to always be role models. Even in our weekly midday prayer group, the two groups did not seem entirely at ease. But in the past few years, some of our former Graduate Student Fellowship Ph.D. students have taken jobs either at UTK or at small colleges in the area and we have seen the benefit of these young faculty interacting with our current grad students and our ministry.
Mutual benefits we see:
1. Returning alumni are welcome to come to our monthly potluck dinners. The dinners are designed so that grad students can get to know each other across various disciplines and as a place Christian grad students can invite their departmental colleagues—whether Christian or not—to for an informal, welcoming event. As alumni have joined us, casual mentoring opportunities have occurred. These alumni know the landscape of the departments and have offered helpful advice to our current grad students.
2. One of our alumna who is a regular at the potlucks has partnered in leading book groups with me. She works at UTK and even though she has her Ph.D., she takes graduate level classes to enhance her resume. One class was on advanced research methods. Since she and I have engaged as friends in deep conversation about multi-ethnic issues, I volunteered our grad group to be her 2018 Spring semester project. Her goal was to identify which academic departments had more grad students of color enrolled and how we can have more welcoming on-ramps for students of color in our Graduate Christian Fellowship. Our grad students participated in her surveys for her data collection. I’d like to say that we are more multi-ethnic than before. We are not as yet, but have identified some areas to work on and concrete things to do.
3. Another alliance is through a UT Martin communications professor who commutes to our campus three days a week to work on his Ph.D. and attends our midweek prayer group. He has worked in the Christian nonprofit field and understands our needs. He has been advising us on how to communicate our ministry vision and how to focus our Advocates Council board and has given helpful advice to Julian’s Apprentice group about “funding the vision.” He plans to bring some of his undergraduate students here to Knoxville to study us and help us further improve our communications.
4. Some graduate women are organizing a Spring retreat. One topic that they wanted for the retreat was financial planning especially geared for graduate school years. The students knew of a young faculty woman in linguistics whose hobby is financial planning and financial health. They asked her to come and she was delighted to be asked. She is recently out of grad school herself, and close in age to the Ph.D. women in our group. She is new in the area and was delighted to be invited to help.
5. Two alumni who graduated last year have been hired to work in academic departments. They are in unique positions to reach graduate students and faculty in their departments and are committed to making connections for the fellowship.
6. A full time researcher in the STEM fields who comes to the potlucks and is a regular at midday prayer each week is easing the way for a 1st year Ph.D. student in a similar field. The student always opens up a little more when the researcher is around, perhaps because he knows if he is asked a difficult question he has backup. This is helpful for the STEM student in a group that currently is dominated by verbal humanities students!
Conclusion:
At UT, Knoxville, we are seeing in a fresh way how engaging with young faculty—particularly those who have been alumni of our fellowship—benefits graduate students, our graduate student ministry, and the young faculty themselves.
