4:00 – 4:05 – Announcements

 

Rachel Richesson convened the meeting and announced that the minutes for two meetings from 2019 have been circulated for review. Hearing no objections regarding the meeting minutes, they are approved and will be published.

 

Tracy Futhey extended an invitation to the group to attend a “Co-curricular materials and programming” brainstorm session. The session will start from 12:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. the following day. This is an effort for people to comment and give feedback.

 

4:05 – 4:30 – DKU Students at Duke, Valerie Hausman, Irina Adams, Judy Heath (15-minute presentation, 10-minute discussion)

Valerie mentioned that the focus of this talk is to share information about DKU students.

  1. Better data regarding students coming in
  2. DKU student survey data results
  3. Priorities over the next 6 months.

Valerie mentioned that they were recently asked about what are the operating principles in play as DKU students come to Duke. Valerie mentioned that one of the main things is that DKU students should have a comparable student experience to that of Duke students. To follow up on that point, there are other factors that play a role in assimilating DKU Students.

  • DKU students will be housed on West Campus
  • DKU students will have access to the 500 level courses and below for which they need prerequisite requirements.
  • DKU students will register at the same time as rising juniors for the fall and for juniors when they register for the spring.
  • DKU students will also be encouraged to participate in co-curricular activities.
  • They will also have access to all of the same resources available to Duke students.

Along with getting DKU students assimilated into the Duke student lifestyle, Duke will provide them with significant pre-arrival, on site and transition back support from an academic and co-curricular perspective to ensure student success.

The last time Valerie was here, she was asked about the demographics of the inaugural class, now sophomores. Valerie said that she now has data for two classes, the now sophomores and the freshman class.

Total class size for both classes is 580 students ranging from 42 countries/regions.

Breaking down the demographics, these are the results:

For the class of 2022, the class size is 255 students. Of those students, 64% are women and 36% men. The class of 2023 has a class size of 325 students. Of those students, 55% are women, and 45% are men. For both classes, 69% of the students are from mainland China. South America, Central America, and other countries in Europe are sending one or two students to DKU. Other countries have from 10-12 students attending DKU. The majority of the students are from Mainland China amounting to 405 students from both classes.

An interesting fact about the class of 2022, 97% of the students intend on come to Duke in Academic year of 20-21. The expected number of students coming to Duke broken down by semester are as follows:

  • Summer 2, 2020: 60
  • Fall, 2020: 120
  • Spring, 2021: 124
  • Summer 1, 2021: 29
  • Summer 2, 2020 Marine Lab: 15
  • Fall, 2020 Marine Lab: 4

These results are based on a September survey by the DKU Office of Study Abroad.

All of the students that plan to come during the summer of 2020 plan to stay in the fall.

The students coming here during the summer 2021 will already be here in the spring.

The marine lab was also opened up as an option in the summer of 2020 and fall of 2020.

The summer Marine lab was capped at 15 students for capacity reasons. For the fall, 4 students were fully committed to attending. As we can see here, the students want to come to Duke to get as much exposure as possible but also to have the experience of studying abroad.

Valerie mentioned that these are the numbers they currently have. However, nobody has had to commit financially nor has anyone had to register for courses. She also mentioned that the number of students for the summer of 2020 might come down for two reasons.

  1. They have to pay for everything
  2. Course offering during the summer is limited.

Q: are there any concerns of courses getting filled up earlier? How is Duke going to ensure that Duke students also register for courses?

A: We have been working with departments in areas where we think there’s likely to be a heavy demand. We are trying to steer students to courses where we know there tends to be some capacity and we have been very clear about their first, second, or even third choice course picks which they might not get.

Next, Irene talked about a Student Interest Survey administered during the month of November. The student interest survey focused on gathering information about who the students are and student course interest. The information gathered here helps to assess where there may be demand for courses and also help with advising. The survey was sent to 120 students. Out of the 120 students, 104 (87%) completed the survey.

Breaking down the survey, 65% of students are female and 35% are male. The survey also collected the student’s nationality.

  • China: 86%
  • Taiwan: 2%,
  • Nepal: 1%,
  • USA: 11%

In terms of course interest, the majority of the students were interested in data sciences, economics. Students were also asked about their motivations for studying at Duke. This is to measure the importance of coursework versus other types of thing they will be doing here.

The results of this question turned out to be with Experience life on a US college campus to be one of the main motives for DKU students wanting to come to Duke. Increase career or graduate school prospects, taking courses with Duke faculty and students, and taking courses not offered at DKU are the other motives for students to come to Duke.

Students were also asked about Academic interests. The top answer here aligns with the question of course interests in that students mentioned Economics and computer science as their top answers. Another question that DKU students were asked was about their interest in co-curricular activities. Many of the students mentioned that outdoor adventures (PE, recreation or sport clubs) and Research (faculty mentored research) were among their top interests. Lastly, students were asked about student group interest. DKU students mentioned that they were interested in groups that shared common interests (gaming, education, tea), academic interests, and career and professional interests as their top answers.

Lastly, Valerie talked about the priorities for the next few months.

  • She mentioned meetings with academic and other departments to review survey data and capacity constraints.
  • Duke Terra Dotta application to get DKU students into our system.
  • Three-day orientation for each group (summer, fall spring)
  • Virtual pre-orientation sessions by topic
  • DKU/Duke peer program led by students
  • Ongoing communication efforts, meetings with faculty, staff, students.
  • In January, visit to DKU to prepare faculty advisors and students for registration.

Questions

Q: What is TerraDotta?

A: is a service to help university students to study abroad. It automates the process of the students applying, administrative work in terms of traveling aboard(visa), and seeing what courses are available to take.

Q: I saw there is a lot of interest in undergraduate research, have you reached out to Dr. Sheila Patek with the muser program?

A: we are working on a resource guide that if you are interested in research opportunities, we will show you ways to explore and reach out.

Q: if we know if co-curricular activities, or spaces that might be of interest, who should we contact? How do we advertise that to those students.?

A: Please work with our office. We would love if anyone has any suggestions to contact us directly or our office.

4:30 – 5:00 – Research Programming Support Services, Charley Kneifel, Mark Delong (20-minute presentation, 10-minute discussion)

During the presentation Mark and Charley highlighted the work being done by a few full-time

staff to support research programming support services. Not only do these full-time staff support

researchers but they also wear many hats. For example, Tom Milledge supports the cluster

computing at Duke and the national labs. Andy Ingham is tasked with supporting data

management and protected data enclaves. Mark DeLong focuses on grant consultation and

development.

 

Charley then proceeded to discuss the various people involved in providing computational

services for grants. Charley mentioned that OIT has been providing direct programming support

for grants for several years. There are also other people that help with various computational

needs and other tasks. Some of the staff that are partially assigned to a grant are, Victor

Orlikowski, Mark McCahill, Rob Carter and others. There is also one developer who is

assigned to a grant in an effort to continue the evolution of best practices for

application development. Charley then proceed to talk about these individuals and the work that

they are doing.

 

One of those persons is Brian Young. Young is working on a software application for Neurosurgery/Grill Lab that helps facilitate closed-loop deep brain stimulation paradigms in relation to Parkinson’s disease. He is also exploring the utilization of machine learning techniques in this context. Additional duties that Brian partakes on is expanding his role in Linux/Container/IOS development in support of the WearDuke project.

 

Erik Daughtrey is working on a traditional software development practices project.

He is a developer on the NanoMineand MetaMine(NIST CSSI project) components of the

materialsmine.org web site encompassing development processes, security, GUI/API

development and guidance, DBMS development, systems management and process

management. This project is encompassed by staff and students from Duke, Northwestern

University, University of Vermont, Caltech and Rensselaer Polytechnic.

 

 

Another research project that is being worked on for data analytics for social sciences is Tom

Balmat. This project uses LexisNexis for data gathering. Development and support of data

analytics and display environments supporting multiple grant programs. Mark highlighted the

a project that Tom is working on that takes a look at the nature of Judge panels and the circuit

courts. Tom has some interesting ideas about how cases can be predicted by outcomes. A project

that Mark and Tom will work on together later this year is to create data management system that

will allow for some normalization of very odd and strange data sets that are measuring basically

the same thing but within different formats to try to make data fair that is available, reusable and,

and well curated.

 

Lastly, Steven Espinosa is a software developer that focuses on the design, development and

deployment of mobile technology. He works with the Rhodes Information Initiative at Duke

(Rhodes iiD) under Dr. Saprio and their various research partners in Duke Center for Autism

and Brain Development, Psychology & Neuroscience and the Department of Neurology and OIT

to create new and interesting ways to use mobile technology in medicine and research.

Espinosa has also been involved in the WearDuke project.

 

Charley and Mark highlighted something unique about these individuals. It was highlighted that

the nature of these individuals to learn new things and the exploration of different tools has been

the ongoing success for all of them.

 

There were no questions from the audience, so the regular meeting ended and the celebration

started.

 

Happy Holidays!!

 

5:00 – 5:30 – Celebration