What is the Leadership Fellowship?
The Leadership Fellowship is a year-long, cohort-based program housed in the office of Graduate Student Life & Wellness. It was created to build a stronger and healthier graduate student community at MSU by supporting and providing space for graduate student leaders to engage in change-oriented projects. Fellows aim to increase belonging and community within their colleges and take initiative on projects that increase graduate student inclusion, interconnectedness, and ultimately success.
This is a funded experience that provides each Fellow with a peer-network, mentorship, and professional development opportunities. An explicit goal of this program each year is to develop a diverse cohort that reaches across the Colleges. As such, we typically select one to two Fellows per College depending on available funding and applicants. Fellows' projects have made meaningful impacts within their Colleges, among certain student populations, and beyond.
Examples of our Fellows' projects:
- Creating a Peer Mentoring Toolkit that led to both college-level changes to mentoring approaches and assessment, as well as changes at the unit level (i.e. one unit he worked with has moved to an entirely new system for assessing mentoring). (Alex Wright)
- Advocating for structural consistency at the college level. Two Fellows began reviewing their college’s by-laws, and learned that there were two designated committees that did not exist. Thanks to their advocacy, their college now has a Student Advisory Committee and a Curriculum Committee (Stephanie Aguilar-Smith and Adrianna Crossing).
- Conducting department- and college-level needs assessment surveys to determine how student leaders, GSOs, and professional development programming can best support graduate students
