FAQs for Staff Supporting Graduate Students

Are you a staff or faculty member who supports graduate students? There is a special section of our website dedicated to graduate administrators in academic departments and programs.

If you are not a graduate administrator, you may be a faculty or staff member who supports graduate students more peripherally, through other offices, centers, and programs. This page is for you! Here are the answers to your frequently asked questions:

How should I communicate with graduate students about upcoming events and opportunities?

If your office has a HubSpot account through Rice, you likely have the ability to email all graduate students with a list populated from current student contact information. We recommend this option for long messages announcing new services or programs.

For shorter announcements, you can submit an item to the Graduate Student Association’s Weekly Announcements here. Those are generally e-mailed to all graduate students each Monday. Short announcements may also be submitted to our office’s Grad Digest, a biweekly newsletter that is generally sent to all graduate students every other Wednesday.

If you have a flyer to distribute, make sure that it complies with the University’s poster policy. You can print flyers and send them to Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (Mail Stop 13) and the graduate administrators in relevant departments and programs, whose contact information can be found here. You can also send a flyer to Rice Graduate Apartments (RGA, Mail Stop 755) and Rice Village Apartments (RVA, Mail Stop 765) if your event or announcement pertains especially to first-year graduate students. You may also wish to send a flyer to the Transportation Department (Mail Stop 554) with a note to request that the flyers be posted in the graduate student shuttles.

If your office has a LiveWhale account, you can include the details of your event on the official Rice calendar at events.rice.edu.

Do all of these channels seem redundant? Maybe! But when we poll graduate students about how they find out about events, we often hear a variety of responses, so these options are often used simultaneously.

What is the best time for a graduate student event?

Great question! Graduate students’ commitments and availability vary widely across campus. We do find that graduate students tend not to attend events quite as late in the evening as their undergraduate counterparts. Generally, late afternoon or early evening will work, and just as with any other event, food is a big draw! You can join the GSA OwlNest page to find out when the Graduate Student Association is having large events if you’d like to avoid a conflict with those events. Subscribe to the GSA's Graduate Student Events Calendar here. To submit events to the calendar, submit information about your event to the GSA Weekly Announcements.

I’d like to ask a graduate student to serve on a committee, working group, or task force, and I need help identifying interested students. Whom should I ask?

You can start by emailing Dean Matsuda at matsuda@rice.edu. He’ll bring the request to the rest of the team and may reach out to our contacts in the Graduate Student Association for suggestions. When you make this request, please include some basic information so that we can identify the students who would best serve your needs. We may have some follow-up questions for additional details, but answers to these questions would be a good start:

Are you looking for PhD students, Masters, or both?
What is the time commitment for your requested committee service?
Which discipline(s) should the students represent, or doesn’t it matter?
Do you want a student who has been elected to a position by their peers?
Do you want to hear from a student with expertise in your subject matter, or would you like to include students who may not be familiar with your subject area?
Would you like experienced graduate students who have been at Rice for a while, someone who has just arrived, or doesn’t it matter to you?
Are there benefits to the student(s) who will serve on the committee? (Free lunch at your meetings, professional development, contacts in other parts of the university, an impact on graduate student life?)

What is the Grad Bubble, and why is it reserved exclusively for graduate student use?

In Spring 2023, the Provisional Campus Facility (PCF) Tent #1 was designated as a space for graduate students to eat meals, gather with friends, and host events. It is now known as the “Grad Bubble.” It is one of only three campus spaces designated solely for graduate student use on campus, the other two being the outdoor “Grad Commons” outside Valhalla and the basement “Captain’s Lounge” where Graduate Student Association meetings are held and event supplies are stored. The Grad Bubble is, by its nature, a makeshift space for graduate students: it does not have plumbing or running water. As such, the Dean of Social Sciences, in collaboration with the Graduate Student Association and Campus Services & Sustainability, has granted card-swipe privileges for Kraft Hall to graduate students during the evenings for the purpose of graduate students’ use of the facilities in Kraft Hall.

Because designated graduate student space is so limited, especially relative to the roughly half of the student population that the graduate student body comprises, the Grad Bubble must be reserved exclusively for graduate students and graduate student events.

Who is the Graduate Student Association’s staff advisor?

The GSA is advised by Assistant Dean Carrie Willard. She can be reached at cdw3@rice.edu.

I’d like more information about how to support graduate students. Do you offer a workshop or training to help me and my colleagues understand the unique needs of graduate students at Rice?

We’re so glad you asked! Contact Assistant Dean Carrie Willard (cdw3@rice.edu) for our “Graduate Support 101” workshop, a two-hour presentation that she can provide to your whole staff, a subset of your group, or new employees. This workshop is an introduction to the vocabulary and unique needs of graduate students at Rice. We offer this workshop several times per year in a general session, or we can come to you for a presentation tailored to your staff.