The College of Pharmacy has within its mission a commitment to promote excellence in research and graduate education. The college provides funding for graduate teaching assistantships (GTAs) in support of this mission. Funding for GTAs varies each year, based on a variety of budgetary concerns, and requests for college-funded (as opposed to investigator-funded) graduate assistantships often exceed available funds. Therefore, a system of assigning college-funded graduate assistantships is based on the following principles:
- Priority is given to the recruitment of diverse and highly qualified new graduate students. With an emphasis on increasing diversity, the College of Pharmacy has identified domestic graduate students and underrepresented minority graduate students as targets for recruitment. Thus, funds for GTAs are made available by the college specifically for recruitment, preferably of new domestic and underrepresented minority students.
- New and continuing students whose research interests overlap with those of junior (nontenured and tenure track) faculty without grant funding are given priority in GTA assignments.
- GTA assignments are made with consideration for the English language and discipline-specific skills needed for teaching assignments in Terminology for Health Professionals, Compounding Lab, Pharmaceutics/Pharmacokinetics, Drug Literature Evaluation and Pharmacology.
- The College of Pharmacy may make commitments to provide specified numbers of GRAs, or dollars toward funding GRAs, in support of collaborative research programs that have been identified by the college as meeting strategic initiatives. For 2007–08, the college has made a commitment to support the Center for Natural Product Antimicrobial Therapeutics by providing two graduate assistantships to students in the medicinal chemistry discipline who are identified by faculty in the center.
- Lowest priority for College funding is given to:
- Students who were accepted without funding and with a clear understanding that funding was not likely to be available for future study.
- Students who have funding from private agencies.
- Students for whom the U.S. or other national governments will support graduate study.
- Students who are assigned to senior faculty and/or faculty with active research grants that can support students.
- Master’s students are not funded by the College of Pharmacy except in special circumstances such as a brief transition period during a midcontract change in degree status.
- Ph.D. graduate students who are working in pharmacy labs toward their thesis but whose major is something other than pharmacy (e.g. MCB, biochemistry/biophysics) are not funded by the College of Pharmacy but are often funded by their major professor in pharmacy. In rare situations where a student with specific skills for a teaching assignment cannot be found among pharmacy majors, a non-pharmacy Ph.D. student may be hired for this purpose.
