The PREP Program at Michigan State University
Melissa Tully

The PREP (Planning, Resilience, Engagement, Professionalism) program at Michigan State University is founded on the principle that graduate students have different needs in various stages of their graduate careers.  Planning, resilience, engagement and professionalism are the fundamental professional themes that underlie the different workshops offered through the PREP program.   PREP workshops (panel discussions followed by breakaway sessions) focus on each of the four professional themes in the early, middle, and late stages of graduate student careers.  The program encourages students to get involved early-on so that they can take full advantage of what PREP has to offer and become more pro-active students.

Professor Rique Campa (Department of Fisheries and Wildlife) is one of the founders of PREP and the faculty leader of CIRTL at MSU.  The idea for PREP came from a need to organize the various graduate workshop programs being offered at MSU and to get the word out to students.  Campa and his colleagues created the PREP matrix as a means of organizing current programs and creating new programs where they saw gaps.  Campa relates the rationale behind PREP to similarities he sees between graduate school and forest succession.  “To me it [graduate school] was very similar to how we look at different types of successions of forests.  When we think about forested systems, and that’s really what graduate school is; it’s a system.  There are different inputs, different outputs.  Students bring certain experiences with them, but as they go through graduate school, they go through a trajectory that is similar to how forested systems go through succession.  Each succession takes a different trajectory, just like each student.”  The idea for the PREP matrix derived from forest succession matrixes.

The program’s success, as measured through student evaluations, is undeniable.  Some of the workshops fill up within two days of being announced and serve 80 to 100 students.  Campa thinks that the CIRTL Network universities could benefit from PREP workshops and the possibility of video-conferencing the panel discussions to other schools or having faculty travel to or from other institutions to offer similar workshops could be in PREP’s future. 

The PREP program seeks to engage graduate students from all disciplines, at every stage of their graduate careers.  It is sensitive to the various needs of students, and takes into account that students have different goals for their post-graduate life.  To learn more about the PREP program visit: http://www.msu.edu/user/gradschl/current/prep.htm.

CIRTL
1025 W. Johnson St.
Madison, WI 53706
ph.: 608.263.0630
fax: 608.265.0538