Students from the French department met on November 19, 2008. Below is a summary of the topics we discussed:

-Health care: The students would like to have dental and vision coverage. There are also concerns about the fact that partner/spouse health care coverage varies according to whether or not you also have children.

-New Haven intersections: The intersections of Olive/Grand and Olive/Court seem to be particularly dangerous and students would like to see improved safety here.

-Shuttle service: It would be helpful if the Green Line started running earlier and also ran later (until 7 or 8 PM). Also, the Blue Line takes a very long time to complete its route in the evening, and students seem to prefer walking home to spending an hour on the bus.

-Online course evaluations: Students on the job market sometimes need to submit official course evaluations for courses that they have taught; it would be helpful for Yale to provide a way to show that these are "official" in the same way that a transcript can be made official.

-Teaching: There were some concerns about how the undergraduate college expansion might affect language courses and our teaching load. (Note: The students have since asked the faculty of the department about this issue, and we were told that neither our teaching load nor our class sizes would increase.)

-French department teaching apprenticeship program: The consensus seems to be that this is a good way to start expanding teaching opportunities, but there is concern that the program will not be put into practice very often because it depends on a number of factors (the student having already completed two semesters of teaching; an undergraduate course of interest to the graduate student being offered when the student has met all requirements for participating in the teaching program; etc.). There was also discussion of the question of graduate students teaching literature courses, but this is problematic because enrollment numbers for undergraduate French literature courses are not high. The goal, then, would be to see more undergraduates taking higher level French courses, and this raises the issue of continuity between language courses and upper level literature courses.

-Mentoring: It may be helpful to have at least one required meeting between first-year students and their assigned advisors (with the hope that faculty members could initiate this meeting if students were not comfortable doing so). There were also some questions about advisors during years 2 and higher.

-Professional development: Students would like to have meetings with faculty to learn more about the profession and specific issues such as conference participation, publishing, thinking about the job market before the last year of graduate school, etc.

-First & second-year reviews: During these reviews, it may be helpful for students to hear more constructive criticism and to be given some more concrete tips for improvement. Topics to discuss could include: language/stylistics/speaking style, presentation skills, writing skills, etc.

-Hiring: The idea of hiring a full-time professor who specializes in language/linguistics was suggested. Such a professor would work with graduate students on questions of stylistics, phonetics, and in-depth language issues that we might not be able to discuss in other classes.

TG 11/23/2008