Welcome to the inaugural issue of Graduate Student News – the Official Newsletter of the College of Graduate Studies.  As many of you know, CSU offers a broad range of graduate programs and enrolls a large number of graduate students. In fact, more than one third of all CSU students are graduate students.

This ratio is the second highest among all public universities in the State of Ohio. Yes, higher than The Ohio State University.  As our graduate programs grow, more achievements in research and education are being accomplished by our graduate students, faculty, and alumni; more events are being organized to enrich our student’s learning experience; and more services are being offered to help our students succeed.  The main goals of Graduate Student News are to:

• Highlight outstanding accomplishments of our students, faculty, and alumni. CSU’s graduate programs are highly regarded and well recognized nationally. For example, more than 20 of our graduate programs were featured in the 2015 edition of U.S. News & World Report's Best Grad Schools released this past March. In particular, our City Management/Urban Policy program was ranked No. 2 and our Nonprofit Management program was ranked No. 12 in the nation. Both programs are in the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs. Other highly ranked CSU programs include the Accelerated MBA, Master of Occupational Therapy, Doctor of Physical Therapy, and Master of Education. These rankings are a significant reflection of our strong faculty, talented students, and high quality academic programs.

• Introduce you to new graduate programs and new student services. To meet the ever changing societal need for well-trained graduate students in high demand areas, we regularly review our existing programs, make needed adjustments to enhance them, and create new programs in emerging areas where there are good career opportunities. Recently created new programs include Master of Legal Studies and graduate certificates in Historical Preservation, Medical Physics, Professional Studies, Organizational Change, Business Analytics, and Entrepreneurship. To better serve a very diverse student body, which includes traditional, international, and non-traditional students who work and have families, we have been working with other campus units to enhance our existing services and launch new initiatives to enhance student success.
   
• Publicize upcoming events. Throughout the semester, various events will be organized on campus to enhance student success and professional development to enrich our students’ learning experience, and to help our students network and interact with each other.  Graduate Student News will publicize these events so that students, faculty, and alumni can plan ahead. 

As you can see, it is an exciting time to be at CSU. There is so much being accomplished every day by our students, faculty, and alumni, and so much going on to make CSU a better place for our students to learn and grow. I hope you find Graduate Student News useful in helping you navigate through your graduate studies at CSU, and I wish you a successful Fall 2014 semester!

Jianping Zhu, Ph.D.
Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and Dean, College of Graduate Studies