Over the past few months, the Astro Grad Congress has been actively engaging with topics relevant to graduate student life through dedicated subcommittees. In this post, we highlight the work of each subcommittee, including our goals, recent progress, and future directions.

Outreach Database

Our goal is to increase access to public engagement opportunities by making it easier for graduate students to launch outreach initiatives at their home institutions. We aim to amplify the positive impact astronomy graduate students can have in their local communities.

To that end, we are compiling a public database of outreach efforts to centralize information, inspire new initiatives, and provide guidance on how similar efforts can be adapted elsewhere. We also hope this fosters more collaboration across institutions and cities!

So far, we’ve created a survey and distributed it across members’ departments and institutions. We’ve received over 20 responses spanning more than a dozen unique institutions. Our next step is to follow up with these respondents to learn more about their outreach work and include it in our database.

Subcommittee contacts: Stephen Schmidt, Daniel Piacitelli, Lou Baya Ould Rouis, Maria Vincent, Lindsay House, Karina Barboza, Sydney Jenkins

Graduate Involvement in Faculty Hiring

Our goal is to advocate for more standardized and meaningful graduate student involvement in faculty hiring processes. We aim to gather information on current practices across institutions and develop a playbook to empower students to have a stronger voice in these decisions.

So far, we’ve compiled documentation describing faculty hiring processes in 10 departments, and we plan to expand this list. Our long-term goal is to turn this into a public resource to help graduate students advocate for inclusion in hiring decisions at their own institutions. Eventually, we also plan to draft a brief public statement outlining the recommended role of graduate students in faculty hiring.

Subcommittee contacts: Ian Williams, Alex Kirby, Vedant Chandra, Yasmeen Asali

Community Building

Our goal is to promote the value of strong departmental communities, especially in fostering equity and a sense of belonging for underrepresented students. We are working to gather and share data that highlight the importance of community-building efforts, and share recommendations with the broader community.

Thus far, we’ve compiled experiences from several departments and identified valuable resources to share such as guides on graduate admissions and fellowship applications. Next, we plan to determine the best platform to host these materials and explore partnerships with organizations such as AAS, CSMA, and AstroBites.

Subcommittee contacts: Sebastian Monzon, Edgar Vidal, Chris Lam

Unionization

Our goal is to assess the current status of unionization across astronomy graduate programs in the U.S., with a particular focus on how unionization can improve stipend levels and working conditions. We also aim to provide resources on how to form a union and share contract examples from existing unions.

So far, we’ve discussed the union status of a few departments within AGC. We plan to distribute a survey to gather more comprehensive data and build a public spreadsheet with up-to-date information and resources.

Subcommittee contacts: Douglas Grion Filho, Bill Smith, Cory Padgett