Gradlife

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By: Georgia Maxwell, Gradlife Ambassador

Our Grad Week is running from March 8th to 12th!

Grad school alone can be overwhelming; grads work in high-pressure environments and have to juggle a lot… Research, TA responsibilities, jobs, relationships, children and maybe even job hunting! This year, it’s no secret that grad students are under more pressure than ever. Most of us have had to migrate all of our coursework and research online, and we are having trouble accessing the support and community that is more easily available on campus.

This year, the focus of Gradlife’s annual Grad Week is to help grads overcome the particular challenges of this difficult year and we’ve called it Optimize your graduate student experience week: Connect and thrive as you Work Remotely. Grad week will run from March 8^th to 12^th, and will feature a full roster of events and workshops designed to help grads find some online community, identify resources available, and above all, thrive personally and academically while working from home.

Putting Grad Week together

We designed Grad Week around feedback we’ve gotten from grads this year on what they’ve been struggling with and how they want to be supported. This means that all of our events are planned with your needs in mind and are relevant to the U of T Grad Experience.

One of the main things grads have told us this year is that they are looking for new ways to connect with their peers and build community. With this in mind, we are running another session of our popular workshop, Talking to People Online (which I blogged about a couple of weeks ago) and to cap off our week, we will be running a virtual speed networking event on the Friday night!

One of the most exciting things about Grad week is that we’ve partnered with professional facilitators outside of Gradlife in order to offer students the most robust and engaging events possible. On March 8^th, Indigenous Learning Strategist Bonnie Jane Maracle will run a workshop on how a medicine wheel model can be used by students for planning and maintaining the balance of the self while getting through coursework. And on March 11^th, U of T’s poet in residence Ronda Bloom will be facilitating a poetry workshop to help grads engage with their senses, other people and their creative side.

How to register

Want to sign up while there’s still space? To register for any or all of the Grad Week events that interest you, you can check out our Grad Week page, or our facebook event. Both will give you our full schedule and the CLNx links to register for each event. As well, I’ve linked each one of our events below in case you want to sign up for them right away. We hope to see you there!

March 8th

Build your Productivity Toolkit to Support Working Remotely as a Graduate Student

Staying on The Path – An offer from an indigenous perspective on self-care and wellness

March 9th

Talking to New People Online for Graduate Students

March 10th

9 Ways to find Community as a Graduate Student while Working from Home

March 11th

How to Be a 3D Person in a Flat-Screened World for Graduate students

March 12th

How to Facilitate Teams Online Effectively During Grad School

Virtual Speed Networking for Graduate Students