Set up Programs
The second step: Setting up each Program
From the Department Profile page's Programs tab, click on the Edit this Program button to get to the Program Profile screen.
Here's a google sheet template you can duplicate to fill in and then share with your grad program administration team. Make sure you read the section on Stages, Milestones, and Requirements, below.
Basic Info
Provide the common name and formal name of the program (e.g. PhD, Doctor of Philosophy).
Settings
We will be adding settings here as new program-specific settings are suggested to us by users.
For now, the only setting is the list of subfields in the program. These are listed on students' profile pages. Simply add them, edit, and delete them as necessary. Note that deleting one will not delete it from students' profiles.
Administrators (Under construction)
This tab allows you to add program-specific Administrators, who will be able to see all faculty in the department but only students in this program. However this feature is still under construction and not available. If you have a strong use-case for it, please let us know about it at support@prograds.com.
Stages
PhD Programs, for example, will typically have four to six stages. These are very common across North American programs and increasingly elsewhere. You may want to use:
- Admitted
- Coursework (could be year 1 or year 2 although that is already something indicated automatically in Prograds)
- Comprehensive (or Qualifying or Prelim) Exams
- Dissertation Proposal / Prospectus
- Dissertation
- Awaiting Defense / Defended
- Graduated (although there is a Graduated indicator on the student record in Prograds, so this is really unnecessary).
Milestones
Within Stages there are usually things that need to be completed to move to the next stage. We call these Milestones. You do not absolutely need to use them, but they can be useful to make sure students and faculty know what has to be done to move from stage to stage. Students can indicate when Milestones are completed and then faculty can approve completion.
When you enter Milestones, you must place them within a Stage. You can provide a description that will appear when that Milestone is opened from a Student page.
Milestones should have Ideal Dates and Deadline Dates. These dates are in months and are relative to each Student's Program Entry Date. When these dates are passed, the Milestones show as Past Due on the Faculty Dashboard and the Student Page. (Email notifications will be triggered by Milestones and Requirments going overdue — this feature is under construction). Note also that if a student has been in the program for a year or more, when they first create their account there will be Milestones and Requirements that are overdue and will simply need to be marked complete by the student, with a completion date.
The order of Milestones within Stages is determined by their Ideal Date. On the student pages the Milestones will be automatically sorted by Stage.
Milestones are baked into the program. Students can only be exempted from Milestones; Milestones can’t be deleted from a Student’s record.
Requirements
Requirements are simply checklist items that should be completed at some point in the program. Administrative users can exempt students from Requirements by opening the Requirement from the Student's page.
Requirements have the same date and completion features as Milestones.
contact us at support@prograds.com
Last updated on June 7, 2022