Attention:
Graduate Program Assistants, Graduate Program Directors, and Graduate Associate/Assistant Deans
The Graduate School has a new form for requesting a specialist committee member for an individual student’s committee. It is a digital form, and it will be the official way to submit these requests starting June 14. Testing is available starting today. This is the first time we have had a form for this approval process, so we expect to revise it at several points. We will announce any revisions before they go live, and we value your feedback. This version does have two minor changes from what was previously required, as described on our website. Please direct questions to approvals@grd.msu.edu.
The new form is self-explanatory. The student's graduate program administrator (director, assistant, etc) will initiate the form using the form submitter’s MSU NetID. There is a link in the instructions to preview the form to see what information will be required. All required information is basically the same as what we had previously requested be sent via email, with two important changes described on our website.
All required fields must be completed correctly or the form will not advance for approval.
- Once the form is submitted, it will be sent to the Graduate Program Director via email and Teams. (To turn off Teams notifications, see our new job aid).
- Upon clicking "Approve" or "Deny" in the request, a section will appear for comments.
- If the GPD denies, then it will be sent back to the form submitter and the student. If the GPD approves, then the form will then be sent to the College and then to the Graduate School.
- Upon final approval, the Graduate School will enter the new committee member into the Campus Solutions database for that student.
- Lastly, the student will receive an email instructing them to add the new member to their committee in GradPlan.
The form submitter, student, and anyone else identified at the end of the form will receive email notifications with every change in status.
We expect that the digital form will make the information easier for approvers to read, prevent Mac/PC incompatibility issues, and reduce the overall time to approval. Below is the link to the new form. Please give it a try! Please note on the digital form that it is a “Test Student” if you do try it out. Testing will end on June 14. Let us know if you have any comments or suggestions: approvals@grd.msu.edu.
You can now also find all Graduate School forms on our new Forms page. The Forms page also includes a job aid that answers FAQs about the technology behind the digital forms and approvals.
