Dear Editors,
I am writing to you today to laud author Nicholas Steinhauser’s Oct. 5 article (“What to expect as a grad student at the College”) and your editorial team for its publication. The piece does an excellent job of encapsulating key intricacies of the graduate experiences offered at the College and how these experiences both expand upon and differ from the undergraduate experience.
As the article suggests, graduate students are a vibrant and growing part of the campus community, and come from many different backgrounds, such as recent graduates of the College and undergraduate programs at other institutions, current College students in combined bachelor’s-to-master’s programs, working professionals and more. Due to the variety of backgrounds, graduate students’ schedules can vary greatly and their experiences are often more individualized based on what opportunities they are most able to participate in.
We—myself and the Office of Graduate and Continuing Education—aim to meet the needs and interests of this population and further bolster this community by working with academic departments, current students and other stakeholders to identify and develop new areas of programming at the graduate level. This effort is explicitly aligned with elements 2, 3, 4 and 5 of the College’s most recent strategic plan, TCNJ 2027: Extending our Excellence.
Two recent examples of such programming include the new Master of Public Policy program and the Master of Arts in Educational Studies, in which students at the post-baccalaureate level complete two education-related graduate certificates as part of an interdisciplinary master’s program. Readers who have ideas for program areas not currently offered by the College are strongly encouraged to contact the Office of Graduate and Continuing Education directly via email (graduate@tcnj.edu).
Sincerely,
Suzanne McCotter, PhD
Dean of Graduate and Continuing Education
