Committees: Why & How

Why We Have Committees

Your committee is there to provide support for your dissertation (feedback, brainstorming, and guidance) and your future career goals (perspectives, guidance, and letters of recommendation). Although your committee will evaluate your work to help guide progress to your larger career goals, they are ultimately just a group of people that have experience in your current field and want to help you succeed. It is a rare opportunity in the professional world to have a full team of people established in your field and invested in your early success. It can be an incredibly empowering resource.

Committees are as useful as the relationships you form with your committee members. Putting more time into those relationships will build a more useful committee. All students must form a committee, have yearly committee meetings, set up and pass a qualifying exam that is administered by their committee, and present their dissertation to their committee for approval. But beyond these necessary committee interactions, the degree to which you will interact with and rely on your committee is up to you. There is no “right” amount of interaction and you get to decide when and how to build those relationships over time.

Ways to Generate Stronger Relationships with Your Committee Members

How to Run an Effective Committee Meeting

Before the Meeting

1. Establish Your "Why"

Meeting with your committee is a good way to get feedback on your research, ensure you are on the right trajectory to meet your educational and career goals, and get to know your committee members so they can write you good letters of recommendation.

2. Determine How Often to Hold Your Meetings

The College of Arts & Sciences requires graduate students to meet with their committees at least once per year. However, you are welcome to call committee meetings or meet with individual committee members more frequently. You should feel free to go for them to request guidance or advice at any time.

3. Schedule the Meeting

Many students feel compelled to wait until the end of the semester/year to schedule committee meetings, because they want “more to show” for themselves. This leads to scheduling bottlenecks since many people are on multiple committees. Scheduling earlier in the semester may be useful. Also, please keep in mind that many faculty are on 9-month appointments and do not plan for committee work over the summer.

It may be a good idea to first get a sense of weeks that would generally work for most members (i.e. no one is out of town). Then send out a poll with times spanning about two weeks. (Including more than two weeks can be cumbersome when filling out multiple polls.) Be sure to follow-up on polls quickly – within a couple of days, because everyone’s schedule changes quickly.

4. Prepare for the Meeting

Some important and effective preparetions to make to improve the flow and outcome of your meeting include:

• Think about what you most want to get out of the meeting – make some goals.
• Plan a time budget; Try to keep the meeting to one hour; Allocate the most time to whatever it is that you want to get the most help/feedback.
• Complete the self-assessment portion of the APDP and any other forms appropriate for your stage (e.g. program of study, etc).
• Prepare a brief presentation or handout that include:
• Introductions (if applicable – i.e. for first meeting of the committee)
• Brief overview of your research (Include the rationale/objective, hypotheses/predictions where appropriate, methods, summary of results and their interpretation)
• Justification for self-evaluation on the APDP
• Provide committee members information they need to fill out the APDP (e.g., conferences you presented at, manuscripts you authored, collaborations you formed)
• Timeline updates
• Send a copy of your CV to your committee.

During the Meeting

It is up to you how you run the meeting. We recommend providing an outline/agenda of the meeting at the start establishing what your main objectives are for the meeting, and letting everyone know where you want to prioritize time during the meeting to meet those goals. Your advisor can help you brainstorm appropriate goals for the meeting.

After that, you may want to run through a presentation/handout to summarize your research questions and work so far. You will also want to make sure to take care of any business matters, such as approving a Program of Study or planning for comprehensive exams. Take notes to organize feedback from your committee. As your committee members discuss your project, note the unique strengths/areas of expertise of different committee members that you may want to follow up on later in 1:1 meetings.

After the meeting

Review any notes you or your advisor made during the meeting, and follow-up on things you would like to discuss further. It is very reasonable to ask specific committee members for an additional meeting to go over suggestions in more detail. Set goals and make a plan for sticking to them