Grad center offers lessons in life

Offering dissertation help, teaching assistant support and interview guidelines, the Graduate Student Center aims to prepare students for their professional careers.

But the center is also focused on less academic avenues -- offering social activities ranging from cosmetics info sessions to first aid training.

These workshops are hosted as part of the Life and Self-Development Series that is part of the larger Career and Life Skills Program created and run by the GSC.

"While the more focused Career Series may not be applicable to all, the Life Series is an opportunity to bring various graduate students together," GSC Director Anita Mastroieni said.

"The Graduate Student Center's mission is to bring together a wide range of graduate professional students who come from a variety of places," Mastroieni said. "The Life Skills Series is a great way of bringing that mission to life and helping to build a graduate student community."

Last night, life-saving techniques -- including CPR and the Heimlich maneuver -- were presented in a seminar entitled "The Worst-Case Scenario First Aid Workshop" presented by Candace Stiklorius, the director of the Patient and Family Education Center at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

The 25 to 30 graduate students present at the program learned basic techniques to be used in the case of a medical emergency.

In the past semester, the programs run in the Career and Life Skills Series have been broken into two separate series, creating the Career Series and the Life and Self-Development Series.

The GSC Career Series is aimed to help students in their preparation for professional life.

"This semester, in terms of career building, we've offered workshops on effective presentation skills, effective writing techniques for the workplace environment and we are going to be offering programs on how to use a PowerPoint presentation effectively," Assistant Director of the GSC DeAnna Cheung said.

The Life and Self-Development Series hosts programs from a wider spectrum. Cheung said that the goal is to assist students in developing their skills in varied walks of life.

Past events in the series have included a massage course and a program entitled "Making Sense of Scents," where students received cosmetics advice.

"We held a session at Douglas Parfumerie where we learned beauty tips," Career and Life Skills Fellow Annapurna Valluri said. "It was a really great time. It was mostly female graduate students. And as a female graduate student, I know we can ignore things like cosmetics, so it was nice to explore beauty products."

Valluri added that the Life and Self-Development Series "gives students the opportunity to focus on other aspects of their lives as graduate students."

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