March 8th - 3 pm eastern

I attended the Organometallic GRC in the summer of 2022. As always, I learned quite a bit at this conference, but the one point that really stood out was the idea of doing a departmental climate survey. The focus of this survey would be the students and their feelings toward the department with regard to a variety of topics. I mentioned this to Professor Wendy Hill, Director of the Hanson Center for Inclusive STEM at Lafayette with some trepidation that she might not be receptive to this idea. I could not have been more wrong. She informed me that two departments had done climate surveys the previous year and they had been incredibly informative and sources of great conversation. She was excited that chemistry was interested in doing this and informed me that we would be the first natural science department to do so.

Things moved quickly from there. A departmental organizing team was formed and the survey quickly took shape. It was administered in early October and the results were distributed to the faculty in January. The results were then presented to the students in a departmental town hall in February.

This SLiThEr will look at the process of developing the survey and describe how it was administered. We are not intending a deep dive into the results during the presentation, but this can certainly be part of the conversation after. The SLiTher will take place Wednesday March 8th at 3 pm eastern and you can sign up here. A Zoom link will be sent out to participants the morning of the event.