Brandeis GPS Blog

Insights on online learning, tips for finding balance, and news and updates from Brandeis GPS

Tag: learning online

Brandeis GPS Faculty Bring Industry Experience to Fully Online Graduate Programs

There is a diverse range of expertise that Brandeis GPS faculty bring to our fully online master’s programs. To learn more about our faculty, and how they impact the student body, we spoke to Brittany Carr, Director of Faculty Operations.

Please can you introduce yourself and tell us what your role is at GPS?

Hi, everyone! My name is Brittany Carr, and I am the Director of Faculty Operations. Some of my responsibilities include recruiting, hiring, and onboarding new adjunct faculty for the school. I am also the liaison between the GPS faculty and the rest of the Brandeis community. When you are coming into such a large institution, such as Brandeis (especially while remote) it can be a bit tricky to navigate it all. I am here to help make things easier for the faculty.

When you recruit faculty, what are some of the reasons why they choose to teach at GPS?

Instructors are interested in joining the team here at GPS because they understand we value the importance of hiring industry practitioners for the role. Additionally, as part-time adjuncts, they can still focus on the valuable work they are involved in at their full-time job. We also run our fully online programs 100% asynchronous, which means that both students and faculty can be based anywhere in the world.

What makes GPS faculty unique in comparison to faculty at other online graduate schools?  

While we require that every new instructor participates in a 6-week teaching training course, our faculty are not lifelong academics by design. We look for professionals on the forefront of their industry, who have a passion to share their work with our students. We value the real-world experiences they bring into the classroom and can provide that hands-on educational experience to our students.

What is the intersection between students and faculty at GPS? How would you describe the student-faculty relationship?

Here at GPS, we keep the class size smaller to ensure that every student feels connected to their classmates and the instructor. Because our programs are virtual, I have found that our faculty work even harder to foster relationships with their students. In addition to the weekly assignments and facilitation, our faculty host weekly office hours over Zoom. As industry leaders, our instructors have often stepped in as mentors on various students’ projects. 

Brandeis GPS welcomes applications for its adjunct faculty pool on an ongoing basis. To view current open positions, please visit our Current Openings page. If you do not see a position that aligns with your experience, feel free to apply to a program – we will keep your application on file for when a potential matching position arises.

My Student Experience

by: Rebecca Weiss

I cannot believe the term is already over! While it seems like these past ten weeks flew by, program-hero-strategic-analyticsI can remember there still being so much snow on the ground the first week and now we finally have beautiful weather outside.

This was my first course with GPS as well as my first graduate course since I graduated from undergrad at Brandeis almost two years ago, so it certainly was an exciting new experience. I was enrolled in Foundations of Data Science and Analytics, one of the required courses for the newest master’s program, Strategic Analytics. I was definitely intimidated when I first began, as an Enrollment Advisor at Brandeis, I had very little formal experience working with analytics. I found as I worked through the course, I could apply the principles I learned into many facets of my day-to-day job and the operations of the university as a whole. Our instructor, Leanne Bateman, was great at making sure we related each week’s discussion back to our own experiences at work. I particularly enjoyed one of our assignments where we had to write a job description for a data scientist in our own office.

CoffeeShopIt was an adjustment to get back into the mindset of doing schoolwork. My first week I left all of my reading and videos for Saturday afternoon and I sat in Starbucks for almost 8 hours! But after the first few weeks, I got into a rhythm of setting out times on particular days to do readings and postings.  After these ten weeks, I am very glad that I took the course and I think it will greatly benefit me at work. I plan on taking the summer off, but maybe I will enroll in my second GPS course in the fall!

 

About the Author:

Rebecca Weiss graduated from Brandeis University in 2012 with a Bachelor of Arts in Politics and Sociology. Currently, she works with Brandeis Graduate Professional Studies as an Enrollment Advisor.

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My Journey as an “Adult” Student

adult-studentOk so here I am, I was told at work that I need to take a course for professional development…really? I already have my master’s degree, I thought I was done with school. Although I did always think that I would be one of those people that was a lifelong student. It has been 10, 11, 12 years maybe since I last took a “real” course. You know what happens, life….marriage, kids, house, etc. etc. all the excuses, I mean, reasons why I haven’t taken any courses since my master’s degree. I must admit this pit in my stomach may be fear or is it excitement? How can I fit a 10-week, 3-graduate credits, minimum 3 posting a week course into my 2 kids (4yr old and 1 yr old), husband, house, full-time job, 2+ hour commute schedule? As I sit hear waiting for fall registration to open, I think the pit in my stomach is excitement and not fear. I’m going to learn again.

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