Evaluate the quality of the graduate courses at the various institutions
This aspect is discussed above. We would add only that the “proof of the pudding” – the
quality of the work of the students who have graduated from the program – indicates that the coursework is probably excellent, and certainly is at least adequate.
Evaluate the combinations of courses that define particular programs. Are they the right combinations? Are certain courses missing? Is there appropriate balance?
One of the greatest strengths of the MEES program is that students can develop their own interdisciplinary curriculum in consultation with their faculty mentor to suit their research and intellectual needs. The Committee did not discover any need to intervene in the definition of curricula in the current MEES construct. Overall, students lauded faculty for the quality of the formal instruction and for their willingness to develop new courses whenever students identified new needs. IVN was frequently cited as being important in facilitating access to courses across the MEES units.
There is general satisfaction with the intent of the proposed new curriculum, although students appeared to lack much information about the proposal. Students and faculty agree that simpler curricular requirements and more predictable course offerings are essential to the optimal functioning of the program.
Recommendation: The committee believes that the particulars of the new curriculum, including the areas of specialization, will benefit from the leadership and vision that should define the future of the MEES program.
Perhaps the most conspicuous limitation of the MEES curriculum is in provision of rigorous training in experimental design, and in basic and multivariate statistics for all students. The required and desired courses mostly seem to be offered at UMCP and are generally not available through IVN, with the result that off-campus students must travel to fulfill a basic requirement for the MEES program. The Committee was surprised to learn that IVN links were used primarily, if not exclusively, by MEES faculty. Faculty primarily teaching in other programs are reluctant to use IVN or it is too difficult to schedule.
Recommendation: IVN links, with a once-per-week on campus recitation or problems class, would seem to be a potential solution to the statistics dilemmas. A greater flexibility and opportunity for IVN links to courses at UMD for this system-wide graduate program would be a great boon to MEES.
For students using molecular tools, access to bioinformatics courses seems scarce.
Recommendation: Assistance in locating such courses and facilitating access to these courses would be of value to MEES. Our understanding is that such courses do exist on various campuses.
Students across all units cited the paucity of advanced graduate course sequences and the fact that those advanced courses may be inefficient, repeating information learned earlier.
Course sequences within a given area of specialization are not clearly defined nor well coordinated.
Recommendation: The MEES curriculum committee should ensure that faculty who are
teaching sequential or closely related courses should share goals and syllabi to develop complementary rather than repetitious courses and to clearly identify the appropriate sequence of courses within an area of specialization.
The Committee found that despite their exceptionally strong interdisciplinary stance and their delivery of graduates into management and policy arenas, the MEES faculty lacks any major strength in the social sciences, and hence the MEES curricula place little emphasis in this area, despite the fact that economics, law, sociology, cultural
anthropology, policy, and other social sciences are integral to marine, estuarine, and other environmental studies.
Recommendation: MEES should consider forging ties to the social sciences. The committee is not clear on how this might be undertaken, although it might be through development of a new area of specialization in collaboration with one or more extant social science programs within the USM. Core courses can also include an embedded social science component appropriate to the topic and the list of required courses should include environmental social science offerings. The inclusion of the social sciences is made more natural when topical areas are defined by critical social questions (sustainable development or agriculture, health of the bay, water quality in watersheds, etc.).
Given the apparent importance to MEES of course distribution via IVN, the Committee wondered how students obtained laboratory training. Students cited intense short courses as an agreeable way to learn techniques. This has worked well for molecular biology.
Recommendation: MEES should consider strategic expansion of the intense short course model as a means to provide laboratory training or to fulfill other curricular
shortcomings.
Evaluate the funding of graduate students as fellows and teaching and research assistants. Where assistantships are involved, what is the appropriateness of the assignments to the students development as instructors and scholars?
It is clear that funding issues exist, but the appropriateness of the assignments seems to be right. Several issues did surface during our discussions:
• The lack of funds, except for research assistantships from external grants, for first-year students is problematic for several institutions.
• There is a large disparity of funding level between teaching assistants and research assistants at UMES. Low stipend levels may discourage recruitment of high quality graduate students, although we saw no evidence that this is the case.
• A general restriction in available funds for graduate student support limits the size of the program. It is generally agreed that the faculty could recruit and train an additional 25% of high quality graduate students relative to current levels were additional funds available.
• Fundraising to support graduate students does occur, but is almost always focused on the specific needs of a specific unit rather than the MEES program.
This is a missed opportunity.
Evaluate the general intellectual environments of MEES for graduate students beyond the formal graduate program.
In general the graduate students with whom we spoke were very enthusiastic about the program. They mentioned their close professional relations with the faculty,
opportunities for presenting and discussing the results of their work with faculty and other students, opportunities to receive travel support to attend scientific meetings, as well as opportunities to acquire scientific writing and other professional and technical skills. The MEES colloquium, an annual event to which all MEES faculty and students are invited, was viewed as an excellent opportunity to meet other program participants, to exchange ideas, and to develop interdisciplinary perspectives.
Owing to the large distances between the various campuses, graduate students noted the difficulty of engaging with other graduate students in the program but not located at their own institution and of developing a sense of programmatic identity. The MEES Graduate Student Organization (GSO) was formed in part to foster communication between
students on all the campuses. We were told that student representatives from the various campuses communicated ca. once per month using IVN or other electronic means.
The drop-out rate of MEES graduate students is very low, perhaps 1-2 students per year on average. This is a sign of an effective and healthy graduate program. No student we interviewed indicated a sufficiently high level of frustration with the program to suggest that they were considering dropping out or moving to a new program. In fact, 5 UMBC students told us that they were encouraged to consider switching to a new program at that institution but chose to remain in MEES.
Evaluate the other aspects of graduate student life such as recruitment, orientation, teacher training, placement, professional networking, professional writing, and training.
In general, MEES students are very confident about their ability to find a position following graduation, and this is borne out by statistics for recent graduates. The most common careers are in State and Federal government and at academic institutions.
Students would benefit by more opportunities to receive career mentoring designed specifically for their degree. One effective way to provide such mentoring is to invite program alumni, especially comparatively young alums, to discuss their careers in a panel setting. This is particularly effective if the alums are chosen to represent different career paths. Such panels could be incorporated into the program of the annual MEES
Colloquium. Other types of mentoring could also be incorporated as part of the
Colloquium. For example, a panel of selected MEES faculty could discuss survival skills in academia, such as grantsmanship, how to negotiate space, salary and start-up costs as well as other issues.
A key person in the life of MEES graduate students is the full time assistant director, Debbie Morrin-Nordlund. Based on what we heard from the students, Debbie is their go- to person to provide information and to help resolve problems with courses and
scheduling, requirements, deadlines and the other challenges that all graduate students encounter. We met with Debbie on the final day of the review and were impressed with her insights and to her dedication to the program.
Evaluate admission practices and procedures, the quality of applicants, and the placement of graduates.
The committee applauds the successful efforts of Ken Paynter over his term as MEES Director to define consistent standards and to streamline the admission procedures. The faculty universally praised the procedures that have been developed and enacted, e.g.
application materials are now easily available to faculty as a pdf via the web. To improve an already good quality system, a personal notification to individual faculty when an appropriate application is received might assist in making sure students are matched with potential advisors (at least one interviewee indicated that this is already being done).
In terms of quality of applicants, the overall statistics of GPA and GRE scores look good, as do the statistics for students accepted and matriculated. A high percentage of students (about 80%) accept offers of admission.
According to reports that we reviewed, students graduating from the program have excellent career opportunities. Most of those continuing beyond the MS degree for a Ph.D. degree remain in the MEES program. We did note that there appear to be very solid links to government agencies in terms of placement of graduates. We believe that these links might be further exploited to the great advantage of the program in the future.
Evaluate the content and substance of the different graduate programs within MEES and their relationship to what is important in the discipline.
MEES has organized its graduate programs along 6 specific thematic lines. Five of these are quite focused on strengths of the faculty and the sixth is a general catch-all title called
“Environmental Science”. In practice, the five specific themes are fairly well defined and seem to capture a reasonable sense of the core of each area. The environmental science theme is much less structured than the others and has been used by some units as the
“default” topic for other themes that they want to develop.
All of the themes have the same overall similar strengths and weaknesses. They are well defined in a specific area but are not well defined in extensions of that area into practice.
The faculty generally range from good to excellent, so they know by their own specific practice and expertise what is good in the science of the field. The required courses reflect that knowledge. The required courses generally have little or no definition of how that scholarship is going to be used. They have little definition in the social sciences connected to the topic except for a poorly defined “management” course. However, in practice this paper deficiency is often rectified by the faculty experience. In fisheries for
example, the faculty teach a very specific fisheries management course and encourage the students to gain other experience in that and related fields. This results in a student with a fairly well rounded understanding of the translation of science into practice. In other themes, this can also happen depending on the interests and expertise of the faculty.
Some seem to see a strong need for expertise in this area and others do not. The students also vary in their sense that this is important. Thus, a vaguely worded requirement results in a range of outcomes from weak to excellent, depending on the faculty interests.
In general, there is nothing wrong with the five well-defined subject areas. They are topical and relevant, albeit somewhat unimaginative – some potential students might consider them to be “old fashioned.” The fisheries theme can be easily related to specific human needs while others are more closely aligned with a specific field or disciplinary description. The program may want to think about re-organizing along themes that define human needs as this creates more natural interdisciplinary linkages as they are defined by what it takes to solve the “problem”. The Environmental Science theme is a broad catch-all that seems to be used to accommodate students in areas that are not defined by an AOS. This seems to have been left over from an earlier era with
students now migrating to other AOS. They had been using the ES AOS and no longer need it when they have a more specific title. This issue should go away if there is a more global plan for environment at USM institutions. Under a global plan, both the specific and the general should be accommodated as well as emerging fields, rather than using one poorly defined track of MEES as the default approach.
Evaluate the quality of the PhD theses, the time to publication of the results, and the journals in which they appear.
The students and their Ph.D. dissertations are an area where MEES should be justifiably very proud. The students are excellent and their productivity shows this. The average number of publications before completing the dissertation (1) is excellent and the average number of publications from the overall dissertation (3-4) is appropriate. There is some variability around these means, but we were pleasantly surprised when a more detailed look showed that many students cluster around these average figures. A few superstars do emerge to skew the mean towards higher numbers (one student had 24 papers in the five years since her dissertation and many had 4-10 within a few years of graduation and this was only from a random sample of a small number of students). The journals generally appear to be the core journals for their field. The overall evaluation indicates a very high quality of student and student productivity. We also noted that a very large number of students quickly transition into competitive government internships (Knauss fellows) and other jobs that do not require the same level of publication for success.
Thus, the high rates are an excellent sign of both the productivity of the students who stay on research tracks and the dedication to publication by those that go into government service.
Is time to degree appropriate?
The time to degree for the MS is too long (average = 3.3 years). The time to get a Ph.D.
is about average for the field, but could be shorter with some positive benefits to the program. We suggest that MEES target the MS at a mean of 2.0 to 2.5 years and we think that the decision to cut off funding at 4 years is a sensible way to encourage shortening the average time to degree. We suggest that they work to get the Ph.D. down to 5.5 or 6.0 years for the mean and, again, think that the MEES decision to cut off funding at 7 years is sensible. We recognize that the program has already made great efforts (like the new cutoffs at 4 and 7 years) to shorten the time to degree. The Ph.D.
timing should respond well to this. The MS is more of a cultural issue. Faculty are apparently expecting “mini-dissertations”. The program leadership is going to have to work hard and creatively to change the culture to ensure that students do well-defined MS theses that are equivalent to one paper and that can be finished in 1 -1.5 years of data collection effort plus additional time to complete analyses and write the thesis.
Advising
Do students receive adequate and current information about courses and programs in MEES?
No. A major complaint of the students is course scheduling and delivery. This is a particularly complicated problem within MEES given the number of institutions involved with the teaching program, but these problems can be resolved. Problems cited by the graduate students include:
• Uncertain scheduling of advanced courses that they need or want.
• Courses that they need but which are not taught on IVN. For example, skill courses taught at UMCP, such as some statistics courses, are not taught over IVN.
This means that students at USM institutions other than UMCP must commute long distances, if they want or need these courses.
• Redundant material in important courses.
• Advanced courses that are not closely linked to core courses, i.e. poor sequencing.
In some cases, courses are scheduled but dropped at the last minute (we do not believe this is common, but it was mentioned).
In concept, there are easy solutions to these problems, although implementation will be difficult without the attention and cooperation of appropriate people in authority at the respective institutions. Possible solutions include the following:
• Teach some key laboratory courses, such as molecular techniques, as an intensive short course (weeks) at one of the institutions that can house the students for the course period.
• Seek cooperation from departments teaching key skill courses, e.g., certain types of statistics courses such as experimental design, to teach at least 1 section via IVN.
• Each year, ask all institutions and faculty teaching in the MEES program to commit to a 3-year schedule and a tentative plan for the subsequent years. The Program Director, supported by a curriculum committee, reviews this schedule each year to identify duplication and gaps. The Program Director negotiates changes, solicits support from appropriate people in authority at the various institutions then posts the final schedule. An MOU among the institutions
pledging cooperation may be necessary to guarantee the success of this approach.
• Seek alternatives within the MEES faculty to teach the courses for those faculty who are unable to stand by their commitments. When a program commits to teaching a required course, they must live up to that commitment. The MOU should define these commitments, and the program should take the responsibility to hire lecturers or find other faculty to take the responsibility of the designated faculty member cannot do it.
Is there a sufficient level of advising to support student needs and interests appropriately? Does it encourage students to make acceptable progress toward their degrees. Does it make appropriate referrals to other services outside MEES?
The Committee heard evidence from students and faculty of strong student-mentor interactions and believes that the commitment of faculty to student training and advising is deep and strong and is one of the many characteristics that make the MEES program a success. No concerns from students regarding advising were heard and when pressed, students indicated that they found they had multiple avenues for seeking guidance and resolving conflicts, through their strong peer-group relationships, through the local de facto graduate advisors, through the MEES office, and through faculty on students’
committees and elsewhere within the system. There is some unevenness in the depth of this multifaceted advising structure within different units of the MEES system, due to the different levels of engagement with the MEES program, but it appeared that the MEES office and the units themselves were sensitive to this.
Recommendation: The apparently ad hoc advising system seems to work. The MEES website and MEES institutions should add links to their web pages that provide
information regarding a local faculty contact for academic advising (by locale and by area of specialization), a local administrative contact for day-to-day advising about graduate program mechanics and other issues, MEES office contact information, as well as a general description of the advising philosophy of the program.
The MEES Office appears to have put in place an infrastructure and culture that should ensure that students make acceptable progress toward their degrees. The requirement to present results at the annual Colloquia appears to serve well in this regard, particularly with respect to a culture of productivity and progress toward a degree.
Recommendation: Continue and strengthen the culture of progress toward degrees through clear statements of expectations at each step of the degree-building process.
Appendix I. Schedule - MEES External Review
May 19-20, 2008