This interactive workshop will assist academic programs and faculty/staff interested in exploring how to be more thoughtful about who and how they recruit, admit, and retain to their graduate student cohorts. During this session, participants will rethink graduate admissions from the ground up. Discussions will include identifying characteristics that contribute to success in graduate programs, what kind of materials and measures can be used to assess those characteristics and qualities, and what kind of rubrics will be necessary to evaluate applicants based on those measures. In addition, the topic of implicit bias will be introduced and participants will discuss strategies for minimizing bias during the admissions process.

Participants will leave with practical suggestions for implementing holistic review and limiting bias in their own contexts. The goal of this event is to help faculty/staff think about holistic admissions as a means to support diversity and inclusion within their disciplines and the academy, recognize the challenges of explicit/implicit bias and how to manage that bias, and think about admission, retention, success, and degree completion in an integrated fashion.

The target audience for this event is faculty across academic programs who are interested in engaging with holistic admissions in order to thoughtfully build their graduate student cohorts. This workshop will bring together faculty/staff across programs to engage in a honest discussion across disciplinary lines about challenges and obstacles to holistic admissions as well as opportunities and strategies to overcome them in order to build stronger programs. We want to create a community of individuals who believe in holistic admissions and what it can do for the betterment of the academy, cultivating leadership and fostering greater diversity and inclusion within academic programs.