Graduate students are in a very interesting space when it comes to Steps to Leaps. On the one hand, they are students that will benefit from growing within the five pillars. On the other hand, they are often instructors and advisors to undergraduate students and an important advocate for resources that will help them grow during their first four years. The Graduate School is leveraging Steps to Leaps to help students with issues they typically deal with while also training them to use the tenets of Steps to Leaps in their classroom and undergraduate mentorship. 

Brittany Ledman, senior communication professional in the Graduate School, points to mental health and well-being as primary issues for graduate students and points to current research that affirms this. They have begun programs to provide resources for students.  

“This fall, we launched our ‘Did You Know?’ campaign to help incoming and existing graduate students learn more about the numerous resources available to them at Purdue,” Ledman says. “In the well-being section, we featured Steps to Leaps. The print component of this campaign included 5,000 folders that were distributed to all incoming graduate students and sent to contacts within each graduate department on the West Lafayette campus.”  

Another example Ledman provided is that they’ve made the weekly Steps to Leaps well-being tips a permanent fixture in the Graduate Student Professional Development newsletter, which is sent to all Graduate School students every Friday, including West Lafayette, Regional and Online graduate students. Think about the ways you communicate with your students.

The Graduate School has also provided training for graduate students to engage their students in the classroom with Steps to Leaps. Steps to Leaps has been incorporated into teaching assistant (TA) training. Franziska Lang incorporated the pillar language of Steps to Leaps into TA training for Chemistry 294 and 599.  This course was designed using a combination of research on evidence-based practices, feedback from student and TA evaluations, and comments from TA focus groups. The course was realigned with the Steps to Leaps pillars to guarantee a holistic TA training experience. In addition, Brittany pointed to graduate orientation as another place Steps to Leaps was introduced.  

“At this year’s new graduate student orientation, which hosted approximately 1,100 incoming graduate students, we invited Dr. Zenephia Evans and Ailin Fei, a graduate student in the Steps to Leaps student organization to talk about the initiative and share their experiences,” Lang says.  

These examples show how the Graduate School has taken Steps to Leaps and put it into action in the classroom.

In what ways are you incorporating Steps to Leaps tenets into your work? Are you finding ways to engage your staff, faculty and student workers in conversations about Steps to Leaps? It is important for all of us to help our students understand the resources available to them at Purdue and how they align with the Steps to Leaps pillars. By focusing on them as well as our staff, we can create a community of knowledge about Steps to Leaps and the resources at Purdue.