Laura Lukes
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Complete these steps before you reach out to a faculty member!
- Familiarize yourself with program requirements. You want to learn as much as possible from the information available to you before you reach out to a faculty member. Be sure to visit the graduate degree program listing and program-specific websites.
- Check whether the program requires you to seek commitment from a supervisor prior to submitting an application. For some programs this is an essential step while others match successful applicants with faculty members within the first year of study. This is either indicated in the program profile under "Admission Information & Requirements" - "Prepare Application" - "Supervision" or on the program website.
- Identify specific faculty members who are conducting research in your specific area of interest.
- Establish that your research interests align with the faculty member’s research interests.
- Read up on the faculty members in the program and the research being conducted in the department.
- Familiarize yourself with their work, read their recent publications and past theses/dissertations that they supervised. Be certain that their research is indeed what you are hoping to study.
- Compose an error-free and grammatically correct email addressed to your specifically targeted faculty member, and remember to use their correct titles.
- Do not send non-specific, mass emails to everyone in the department hoping for a match.
- Address the faculty members by name. Your contact should be genuine rather than generic.
- Include a brief outline of your academic background, why you are interested in working with the faculty member, and what experience you could bring to the department. The supervision enquiry form guides you with targeted questions. Ensure to craft compelling answers to these questions.
- Highlight your achievements and why you are a top student. Faculty members receive dozens of requests from prospective students and you may have less than 30 seconds to pique someone’s interest.
- Demonstrate that you are familiar with their research:
- Convey the specific ways you are a good fit for the program.
- Convey the specific ways the program/lab/faculty member is a good fit for the research you are interested in/already conducting.
- Be enthusiastic, but don’t overdo it.
G+PS regularly provides virtual sessions that focus on admission requirements and procedures and tips how to improve your application.
ADVICE AND INSIGHTS FROM UBC FACULTY ON REACHING OUT TO SUPERVISORS
These videos contain some general advice from faculty across UBC on finding and reaching out to a potential thesis supervisor.
Supervision Enquiry
Graduate Student Supervision
Master's Student Supervision
Theses completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest theses.
Geologic time has been identified as a threshold concept in geoscience (Teed and Slattery 2011) for those who are pursuing careers in geoscience. It is such an intricate concept that has remained challenging to communicate in formal learning environments for a long time, let alone in informal learning environments. There is limited research on how people conceptualize and learn geologic time (Ryker et al. 2018). The use of validated instruments to assess student understanding of geologic time has been a common practice among researchers and practitioners. However, it remains a question whether those questions in the validated instruments are capable enough in reporting students’ knowledge. Therefore, a mixed-methods study was conducted on undergraduate students. The results showed that while most students knew the relative order and spacing of events in Earth’s history, it was difficult for them to provide absolute ages for those events or provide dates that aligned with the relative spacing of the Earth history timeline figure they chose. Students were especially confused about the absolute ages of more recent events– the disappearance of dinosaurs and the appearance of humans. Now in informal learning environments, it was more important to check whether visitors engage with a digital geologic time exhibit, and if they do, then whether there is any evidence of cognitive and affective engagement in their behaviors. A mixed-methods study was conducted to get an account of visitor engagement patterns with a digital geologic time exhibit in Beaty Biodiversity Museum. The results reveal that people did interact with the exhibit, but duration of interaction was mostly less than one minute. Visitors in groups tended to interact with exhibit more than individual visitors, and those groups typically consisted of adults and kids who seemed like family/friend groups. There was also evidence of cognitive (e.g., curiosity) and affective (e.g., enjoyment) engagement among those who interacted suggesting that digital exhibits can initiate situational interest among visitors in informal learning environments. Insights from both studies lay the groundwork for developing new tools (e.g., pre/post-test instrument and interview protocol) to assess people’s learning about geologic time for formal and informal learning environments.
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