This page was created to help with leadership continuity, knowledge sustainability, and onboarding new college reps and committee members.

For committee members

  • Get access to the Shared Google Drive from executive board.
  • Get access to the Teams site from executive board.
  • Mine your saved articles and bookmarks for useful resources.
  • Review the current initiatives on your committee page--which initiatives are you passionate about? Do you have new suggestions for what your committee could be doing?
  • Review your professional societies for useful professional development resources.
  • Consider your career goals, your strengths, and your gaps in training; think about how UIPDA opportunities could be used to create new opportunities.
  • Read the latest UIPDA postdoc survey summary to understand the needs of our posts community.
  • Explore the National Postdoc Association site; familiarize yourself with the resource guides, reports, and advocacy materials here.
  • Awards Committee: coordinate with John Riehl about the Grad College workflow for reviewing applications.

For college reps

  • Get access to the Shared Google Drive from the executive board.
  • Get access to the Teams site from the executive board.
  • Mine your saved articles and bookmarks for useful resources.
  • Review your professional societies for useful professional development resources.
  • Read the latest UIPDA postdoc survey summary to understand the needs of our posts community.
  • Explore the National Postdoc Association site; familiarize yourself with the resource guides, reports, and advocacy materials here.
  • Identify key contacts in your college--who are potential advocates? Is there someone we should add to the key contacts list?
  • Set up an initial meeting with your associate dean (see key contacts list) to introduce yourself.
  • Meet postdocs in your college and ask about their experiences; this is important so that you can relay the concerns and challenges of your college sub-population to college administrators.
  • Determine if there are college-specific networks for sharing information about events (example: the biomes-grad-postdoc listserv in CCOM or the CCOM and PBDB digital signage).

For the executive board

  • Get access to the Shared Google Drive from the current executive board.
  • Get access to the Teams site from the current executive board.
  • Get access to the grad-uipda@uiowa.edu email (from John Riehl, Grad College).
  • Mine your saved articles and bookmarks for useful resources.
  • Review your professional societies for useful professional development resources.
  • Read the latest UIPDA postdoc survey summary to understand the needs of our posts community.
  • Explore the National Postdoc Association site; familiarize yourself with the resource guides, reports, and advocacy materials here.
  • Make sure the NPA sustaining membership is up to date (this can be verified on the NPA site); questions can be directed to Kryste Ferguson at NPA or to the UI Grad College).
  • Familiarize yourself with the university org charts, in particular the OVPR, Grad College, and Provost Office.
  • Set up a meet and greet with Grad College staff, collegiate associate deans, and key central units (OVPR, Benefits, etc.). Generally held in late August each year.
  • Learn how to add postdocs to the listserv.
  • Learn how to send emails to the postdoc listserv.
  • Learn how to add events to the main UI calendar.
  • Review these UIPDA event sharing strategies.
  • President: reach out to shared governance leaders.
  • Vice President: reach out to Research Council about joining as the new postdoc representative.
  • Secretary/Treasurer: confirm annual budget with Grad College.

For webmasters and social media managers

  • Get administrator privileges to the FB page, FB group, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts.
  • Review the campus social media database and Twitter lists; update as needed.
  • Review these UIPDA event sharing strategies.
  • For Twitter tagging, spend some time looking at who responds to our posts--these are accounts you want to tag to get the most traffic.
  • Have John Riehl add you to the Drupal 10 administrator list for the uipda.grad.uiowa.edu page.
  • Review the social media templates on the shared Google drive; use these or create your own (Canva is a great source for these).