Top Scholar Awards

11/15/07 E-mail message from Vice Provost and Dean, Suzanne Ortega sent to Academic Program Directors, Chairs, Graduate Program Coordinators and Graduate Program Assistants

Dear Colleagues,

This message serves two purposes related to your 2007-08 and 2008-09 Top Scholar Awards.

First, we have cloned your 2007-08 award in MyGradProgram as a draft award for the 2008-09 academic year.   We ask that you access these draft awards in MyGradProgram and either renew them as presented or request changes.  Changes that increase the total dollar amount of the award will not be approved.  Changes that may be approved are those that address adjustments in the type of awards.  For instance, perhaps travel funds are not proving useful to a particular unit and one-time fellowship funding to supplement an RA award might be better utilized.  A unit might therefore request that all or part of the travel funding be changed to one-time fellowship funding for the 2008-09 academic year.  This change will not increase the total dollar amount of the award and will have a good chance of being approved if the justification is well documented.

The deadline for renewing or requesting changes to awards is January 15, 2008 but we will respond to requested changes as we receive them so you will not have to wait until January 15th to get a response.  As you review these awards, please ignore the salary amounts identified for RA quarters.  The salaries for RA's will be adjusted to actual salaries in the year they are used EXCEPT for those units having awards that were fixed at the 2006-07 level.  Please review the 2007-08 award comments to identify whether your unit received an award that was fixed at 2006-07 levels.

Secondly, in the call for proposals, we stated that we would review the success of each program's recruitment strategy after the first year and try to assess its success in achieving goals expressed in the proposal.  As part of this review, we are asking that you provide some specific information concerning your offers of Top Scholar Awards that we are unable to obtain centrally.  In particular, the requested information addresses, yield on offers of Top Scholar Awards; the reasons for success or non-success of the offer (if known); whether Top Scholar offers were part of multi-year funding packages or not; and where applicants enrolled if they did not accept an offer to attend the UW (if known).  We understand that there will be some gaps in this information, but we ask that you do your best to provide what is reasonably available to you.  A Microsoft Word template is provided for this purpose in the attachment to this message.  You are not required to use this table but we hope it will assist you in providing the information.  We do, however, ask that you submit the information via e-mail.  Please submit completed survey results to Gary Farris (gfarris@u.washington.edu).  

Once we receive the survey information, we will combine it with information we can obtain centrally and provide an overall profile of the awards addressing such things as gender and ethnicity of the recipients, whether recipients are domestic or international students, the primary institutions we are losing the best students to, etc.  

If you have any problems opening the attachment or accessing your awards in MyGradProgram, please contact Gary Farris at 6-9158 or via e-mail at the above noted e-mail address.

I thank you in advance for your participation and attention to both of these items and wish you the best of success in recruiting your top student prospects to your programs for the 2008-09 academic year.    

Best Regards,

Suzanne Ortega
Vice Provost and Dean
The  Graduate School

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