Welcome Letter from the Dean

Welcome back! We are excited to be back on campus for the start of the 2021-2022 academic year with more than 5,000 graduate students in our online, on-campus, and hybrid programs. The start of a new academic year always brings excitement, enthusiasm, and of course, a lot of work. We experienced an increase in our graduate enrollment last year; however, this year our graduate enrollment is expected to decline slightly. We believe much of this is due to increased competition, especially for students in some of our largest online programs. We will be working more closely with colleges, departments, and graduate program directors this year to help implement strategies to increase our graduate enrollment. Our goal is to increase the number of offers of admission at the graduate level for Fall 2022 by 1%. Please be sure to read more about this in the section "Focus on Recruiting and Enrollment" later in this newsletter.

After nearly two years like no others, our graduate students have faced many challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Covid-19 transmission rates in Pitt County are extremely high right now, and unvaccinated people are at an extremely high risk. Vaccinated people are at lower risk. If you’re not vaccinated yet I encourage you to do so for your own health and well-being, as well as the health and well-being of your friends, family and loved ones.

For graduate students whose progress has been delayed due to the pandemic, I encourage faculty to be compassionate and understanding. For some, the need to provide care for children at home or adult parents may have disrupted their studies. For students in research-intensive master’s or doctoral programs, progress may have been delayed because of limited access to facilities, services or personnel, resulting in a disruption of laboratory work, a disruption in field studies, or a disruption in access to clinical populations. To help our graduate students cope in situations like this I encourage faculty to be flexible, allow extra time to meet deadlines, complete degrees, and be sensitive to their mental health needs.

Paul Gemperline, Dean of the Graduate School

Student Mental Health

COVID-19 has certainly brought upon all of us more stress and uncertainty. For our graduate students, this is another stressor in addition to their usual balancing of employment, research, course work and their personal obligations such as family. To assist them with these difficult complexities, the ECU Center for Counseling and Student Development (CCSD) provides emotional health care to ECU students through the provision of crisis screenings and support, individual and group counseling, referrals, and other psychoeducational programs to assist our ECU student population. Services are currently being offered virtually. This year, ECU is expanding the existing mental health services offered by CCSD through the purchase of a virtual support program called “My Student Support Program” or MySSP. My SSP utilizes phone and chat-based features (accessed through the MySSP app) to connect students to counselors who are available to assist the student population 24/7. Scheduled video therapy is available by request in over 100 languages. Accessible via app, phone or desktop, the services are free and confidential and immediately available. MySSP is of particular importance for distance education students who are not eligible for services through the Center for Counseling and Student Development. In MySSP’s attempt to reduce the stigma surrounding mental health, barriers to help-seeking have been reduced by making the program so accessible. 24/7 chat and phone support are available in Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish, French, and English. MySSP is funded through COVID relief funds, and we expect it will be available for two years. We will be working with our campus partners in the Dean of Students office, the Center for Counseling and Student Development, and the Student Health Service to educate our graduate students about the mental health resources available to them. As a reminder, for life-threatening student mental health emergencies, please call 911. To report a student of concern, please access ECU Cares through https://ecucares.ecu.edu or by calling 252-328-9297. For mental health crises, please contact the Center for Counseling and Student Development at 252-328-6661 (for after-hours support, select Option 2). For more information about all relevant mental health services: https://counselingcenter.ecu.edu. MySSP is of particular importance for distance education students who are not eligible for services through the Center for Counseling and Student Development (unless they have paid the student health service fee).

Link to My Student Support Program (MySSP) Flyer

Focus on Recruiting and Enrollment

The Graduate School strives to be a good partner with colleges and graduate programs by leading and coordinating centralized marketing, advertising, and recruiting strategies as well as advocating for resources to support these efforts. We do general-purpose recruiting and we’re the initial point of contact for prospects, inquiries, and applicants. We maintain a vast array of communication plans in our customer relationship management (CRM) system that is customized for each of our graduate programs. Our communication plans have conditional logic and workflow triggers so that students receive customized email communications and text messages as they go through different phases of the recruiting funnel. With 76 programs and 76 certificates, that’s a significant workload.

80,000+ Text Messages

Last year we started using text messages in our automated communication plans. So far, we’ve sent more than 80,000 text messages to prospects, applicants and admitted graduate students. These texts are personalized with the recipient’s name and go out under the name of one of our processors. Most are triggered by workflows that encourage applicants to take action, like submitting missing documents or registering for classes. This form of communication is more effective than email, with read rates up to 60%, with up to 40% viewed in 5 minutes or less. When applicants text us with questions our processors respond quickly with individualized responses.

Central Funding for Advertising

ECU has budgeted significant funds this year to continue supporting marketing and recruiting efforts through digital advertising, test score name buys, and by employing graduate student ambassadors. Our key partners include the Graduate Admission Office, Clint Bailey, Director of Marketing Strategy and his office, and Associate Deans from each college. With input from college associate deans, we prioritize and conduct targeted advertising campaigns for graduate programs where we anticipate there is an opportunity for growth based on student and societal demand, and faculty capacity.

Search Engine Optimization

This fall, with additional one-time funding from ECU’s Strategic Enrollment Planning committee, we are working with the education consulting firm, Ruffalo Noel Levits to implement search engine optimization strategies for 50 academic program and priority webpages. We expect to learn and develop significant in-house expertise in this area as we work with Ruffalo Noel Levits experts.

Collaborative Partnerships with Colleges

Our Graduate Marketing and Recruiting (GMR) hub meets monthly with associate deans from each college to discuss innovative marketing and recruiting strategies. We review the latest enrollment statistics by college and program using point-in-time comparison data from prior years to identify hot spots and challenges. With this collaborative approach, institutional learning is taking place. The associate deans convey information at appropriate times in college meetings and help us look for opportunities to improve our centralized marketing and recruiting efforts. They help us prioritize graduate programs for targeted advertising and recruiting efforts. This collaborative and partnership approach is now institutionalized. It’s a whole new day for ECU. Thinking about the marketing and recruiting strategies we started working on three years ago, I could not have asked for a better outcome.

Grad PIRATE Talks: Promoting Inclusions through Research, Action, Teaching and Education

We are excited to announce that our graduate students are planning a continuation of the multidisciplinary seminar series titled Grad PIRATE Talks: Promoting Inclusions through Research, Action, Teaching and Education. Leading this effort are co-chairs Emma Goldberg and Zoe Terwilliger, Ph.D. students in the Department of Physiology, and Amina Butler, MS student in Chemistry. A total of 16 webinars consisting of short presentations followed by discussion and Q&A were presented last year covering a broad array of topics. Links to recordings from the fall semester and the spring semester are available.

These graduate student led webinars focus on inclusion, equity, and social justice. The goal of these talks is to bring social justice issues to light and educate the Pirate Community at large on how race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, and more affect the lives of our Pirate Nation and our Nation as a whole. Through intentional and purposeful dialogue, our student organizers and presenters hope to build a more inclusive and equitable future for East Carolina University.

Our student co-chairs want to reach out to you with an opportunity for your students to become actively involved and engaged in the third installment of this series. They are looking for graduate students who are passionate about social justice issues and would be interested in giving a 15-30-minute talk on how these issues affect their area of study. Their goal is to challenge impassioned individuals to propose ways in which we, as a community, can better the way we teach, think and act on these issues. If you have any questions or suggestions, please reach out to one of the co-chairs.

Emma Goldberg, Ph.D. student, Department of Physiology, goldberge17@students.ecu.edu

Zoe Terwilliger, Ph.D. student, Department of Physiology terwilligerz19@students.ecu.edu

Amina Butler, MS student, Department of Chemistry, Butleram16@students.ecu.edu

TargetX

We’ve been busy this summer implementing a new online graduate application system and customer relations management (CRM) system called TargetX. We anticipate going live with this new system this fall semester. Training for graduate program directors and support staff will be offered well in advance of our go-live event, and we expect campus users will be pleased with the clean, user-friendly interface it offers. The Undergraduate Admissions office is also implementing their new application system in TargetX and we expect to realize greater campus efficiencies by using the same system.

TargetX was selected after a review of the leading admission CRM systems by a cross-departmental committee. TargetX is built on top of Salesforce.com, the global market leader in CRM technology. We’re excited about the new features this platform offers, its clean interface, automated workflows for triggering email and text message communications, the opportunity to simplify back-office operations, and the powerful analytics that will give us a competitive advantage in our recruiting and admissions operations.

Recent Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

More than 80 graduate student theses and dissertations were submitted and approved this summer. It’s exciting to see these student products. The breadth of the subject matter covered and high quality is a testament to the great work our students are doing and the excellent mentoring they receive from our faculty. From this summer’s submissions, we’ve highlighted titles from the MS Computer Science, MS Software Engineering, and the MS Biomedical Engineering degree programs. Titles and abstracts for these documents may be found in The Scholar Ship, ECU's digital archive for scholarly output. The entire thesis is available online in cases where the student has requested immediate open-access release. Congratulations to all of our students who completed their thesis or dissertation projects this summer.

• Davis, Storm Pierce. (July 2021). LOOKING TO THE STARS: A HYBRID VOTING APPROACH FOR STAR RATING PREDICTION OF AMAZON CUSTOMER REVIEWS, MS Software Engineering
• Butler, Tricia. (July 2021). COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS OF 3D FINITE ELEMENT MODELING OF THE TIBIA USING A HEALTHY RUNNING POPULATION, MS Biomedical Engineering
• Dick, Joelle F. (July 2021). EXPLORING THE EFFECTS OF OFFLINE PARADIGMS AND FEATURE EXTRACTION TECHNIQUES ON PERFORMANCE OF MOTOR IMAGERY BASED BRAIN-COMPUTER INTERFACE, MS Biomedical Engineering
• Cone, Chris B. (June 2021). CHARACETERIZATION OF PHOTORECEPTOR-CONTROLLED AGGREGATION AND DISAGGREGATION OF MICROPARTICLE SUSPENSIONS, MS Biomedical Engineering
• Abdelfattah, Basel Ahmed. (June 2021). INVESTIGATING THE PERFORMANCE OF THE VISUAL ODDBALL PARADIGM IN THE CONTEXT OF FACIAL RECOGNITION, MS Biomedical Engineering
• Chilcoat, Elizabeth. (July 2021). A CLINICAL DECISION SYSTEM WITH AN INTERACTIVE KNOWLEDGE GRAPH AND COST OPTIMIZATION, MS Computer Science
• Olufowobi, Kenny. (July 2021). TOWARDS A LOW-COST VISION SYSTEM FOR REAL-TIME PAVEMENT CONDITION ASSESSMENT, MS Computer Science
• Khanjari Nezhad Jooneghani, Zeinab. (July 2021). COMPARISON OF TOPIC MODELING METHODS FOR ANALYZING TWEETS ON COVID-19 VACCINE, MS Computer Science
• Andriot, Jennifer. (July 2021). AN HMM-BASED OCR FRAMEWORK FOR TELUGU USING A TRANSFER LEARNING APPROACH, MS Computer Science

Personnel Changes in the Graduate School

The Graduate School has four active searches underway, and we are looking forward to filling these positions quickly. We said goodbye to Associate Dean Tom McConnell at the end of June and we have three other staff members who have moved on – Lynn Couturier (to ECU Financial Services), Shukita Daniels and Brenda Romero – they are both pursuing opportunities elsewhere.

Our vacant Associate Dean position was posted on Friday, August 20, and interested individuals are encouraged to apply. The search committee for this position will be chaired by Dr. Kathy Cox with members Dr. Ron Preston, Dr. Stacey Altman, Dr. Rich Franklin, and Mr. Paul Russell. We are screening candidates for three Administrative Support Special Specialist positions; two admission processors and the graduate assistantship contract and EPAF approval position. Until these positions are filled, please be a little extra patient with us. The workload of these individuals has been temporarily distributed among existing staff. Our top priorities have been to make sure graduate assistantship contracts get approved without disruption so that students get paid in a timely fashion this fall, and to ensure that graduate admissions operations continue without any disruptions or delays.

Heidi Terry, Assistant Dean, Graduate Admissions and Enrollment Management is leaving to take a position in Florida with increased executive responsibility and pay. Her last full day will be Sept. 9, 2021. Heidi will enjoy being closer to her daughter and grandchildren. We wish her the best in her new position and thank her for her dedication, exceptional work ethic, and the many improvements she has made in the Graduate Admission Office during the three years of her employment at ECU. Planning is underway to fill in the gaps left by her departure, and I am confident we will continue admission office operations and TargetX implementation without significant disruptions.

Closing Remarks

I’d like to offer one of my favorite poems by Emily Dickenson to end this newsletter on a positive note. For me, this poem is a reminder to keep a positive attitude in everything I do despite ongoing challenges, whether they be budget challenges, workforce challenges, or operational challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Photo: Blue-winged teal @SylvanHeightsBirdPark, Scotland Neck, NC