UBC Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (G+PS) recognizes that People of Colour face systemic barriers to higher education and are not represented among researchers to parallel their representation in the Canadian population. Therefore, new award funding will be made available to Black and graduate students of colour.
Through a series of listening sessions in Fall 2021, we are hoping to understand the lived experience of racialized graduate students better to develop some options for awards. These options will be shared in another series of engagement sessions in Spring 2022 to lead to a proposal for funding to be disbursed as of September 2023.
We are now inviting racialized graduate students to engagement sessions to contribute to this thinking about what kind of awards might meet the needs of these students.
We are offering the following town-hall style meetings via Zoom, but would also be happy to engage student organizations directly.
- Monday, October 25 from 9:30 to 11 a.m.
- Wednesday, October 27 from 3 to 4:30 p.m.
- Friday, October 29 from 12 to 1:30 p.m.
- Tuesday, November 2 from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
- Thursday, November 4, from 2 to 3:30 p.m.
Parameters for the engagement sessions
- Note that additional award funding for Indigenous graduate students will be considered in a separate set of engagement sessions.
- While the allocated budget and thus these discussions are limited to award funding to go directly to graduate students, we will also take note of programming needs that would improve access to, the experience at UBC, and the outcomes for racialized graduate students.
Some of the big questions in our mind
- Can we identify the specific obstacles that racialized graduate students are facing that could be addressed by funding? Or, is it an accumulation of barriers that students are facing in graduate education that is not easily identified with specific stages in a graduate student journey?
- Are there other goals/purposes that this funding should be targeting beyond representation in graduate programs?
Registration is now closed.