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The Women’s Studies Research Center Internship:
Student-Scholar Partnership (SSP)
Project Proposal Form Spring 2016 Directions
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Before submittal, please make sure you have read the “Fall 2015 - Spring 2016 Hiring Guidelines”.
After review, please return completed proposal packets (includes: form and statement) by Wednesday,
December 23, 2015 to Kristen Mullin, SSP Program Coordinator: mullin@brandeis.edu. Please note:
Each selected project will be awarded 50 hours over the course of the Spring 2016 semester. Students
will start January 13, 2016 and work until May, 2, 2016.
Project Proposal Guidelines
The SSP chooses new projects based on specific criteria. The criteria for new projects is based on both
the Mission and the Purposes of the SSP. The SSP is a successful and learning-rich mentoring
internship. It has been successful due to its founding guidelines and these new, more specific
guidelines will keep the SSP true to its original intent and mission.
1. Projects will be chosen for each semester based on the following criteria, in the following order:
a. Does it relate back to the field of Women’s Studies? The mission of the SSP is to present
working partnerships on projects that relate back clearly to the field of Women’s Studies.
b. Is the work being offered to the student a genuine, learning-rich experience with varied
duties and responsibilities? Example: Will student be working on reading and summarizing,
or just locating articles and not giving input? Only be updating web page, or actually
thinking through content and discussing with mentor? Just transcribing, or analyzing and
clarifying?
c. How devoted is the mentor to ensuring a mentor-mentee relationship? Are meeting times
and goals clearly articulated?
d. Will it necessitate more than one semester of work? The SSPP can and will only guarantee
one semester of paid work together.
e. Was the proposal submitted on time and in complete form?
2. The SSPP will strive to present a wide variety of projects in different fields each semester – the Arts,
Psychology, Science, Sociology, Women’s / Gender Studies, Journalism, Literature, etc.
Student-Scholar Partnership
Spring 2016
Project Proposal
The Women’s Studies Research Center Internship:
Student-Scholar Partnership (SSP)
Project Proposal Form Spring 2016 – BOTH New and Continuing
SCHOLAR INFORMATION
Name:
E-mail:
Nance Goldstein
Brandeis WSRC Resident Scholar
nance@brandeis.edu
Are there dates during the semester when you will be traveling/unreachable? Please specify.
- No plans at this time.
PROJECT INFORMATION
Title of Project:
Creating an Online Course in Conflict Engagement for Physicians
This is a new project. It builds on what we learned in the Fall 2015 SSPP work.
Describe your research project in three sentences for advertising purposes. (More detailed description will be given later in
this app.)
The SSP and Scholar will position and plan an online course to train physicians to deal with conflict more easily
and more successfully.
Women physicians face an extraordinary amount of conflict – conflict with colleagues and supervisors, with
patient families, with their spouses and often with their children. Too often this derives from expectations that
good women physicians wholly dedicate their time to medicine, when the reality is that home and family
responsibilities fall disproportionately on women….even now. Women physicians too often respond to the
resulting conflict by reducing or leaving their practices. An online course will provide a high quality “any-timeanywhere” opportunity toimprove how they face conflict and how they feel and perform.
STUDENT PARTNER INFORMATION
Have you participated in the Student-Scholar Partnership in prior years?
- Rebecca Groner
Fall 2015
- Leslie Kamel
- Zhang Rong Rong
- Lauren Doamekpor
- Vrinda Shukla
- Rachel Leep
- Julie Liu
Yes
Will you be continuing with a student partner from a previous semester?
Yes _____ No __X___
Working with Becca Groner was great in many ways. But she soon leaves for winter semester in Chile!
Do you have a particular new student candidate or candidates with whom you would like to work?
No __X__
What is your timeline for work to commence on your research project this semester?
Immediate start
Student-Scholar Partnership
Spring 2016
Project Proposal
Scholars and faculty members participating in the SSP Program are required to meet with their
student research assistants on a weekly basis for supervision.
Please explain how you will fulfill this commitment. Where do you plan to hold supervision meetings?
How will you manage time together when one of you is traveling/vacationing?
-
I maintain good regular communications with my partners via email, responding fast to theirs.
I give my SSP my cell number so that s/he can contact me whenever an opportunity or problem
appears so we can address it swiftly. The semester is short!
We meet regularly at WSRC, setting a day and timing that fits their class schedule. This past
semester we met on Mondays at 10
I consider the student’s academic success a top priority. Our flexibility is very important. I actively
work around her/his academic demands
Hiring Criteria Reminder: The SSP is designed for Students and Scholars to work together for 50
hours on a project in the Scholar’s area of expertise. All candidates who apply must be considered.
Final choices should be made based on student’s background, skills and level of interest. Decisions
may not be made based solely on academic year standing.
Qualifications Needed for Student Partner:
REQUESTED
Related coursework:
Technical Skills:
WOULD BE LOVELY
Interest in healthcare, medicine
not necessary
Clear, concise writing
Email awareness
Careful notes about research
methods
Past Experience:
Similar Professional Interests:
Curiosity
Other (please indicate):
Willingness to ask questions
Communicates clearly, concisely, respectfully
Communicates when there are
Barriers to progress or meeting
planned deadlines
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
1. Please give a detailed description of your project.
This project plans and creates an online course to enable physicians to deal with conflict with greater ease – so
they feel better and perform better. It builds on my experience in face-to-face training to create a high quality,
powerful online method for them to reduce the stress and improve the results of conflict.
Conflict riddles healthcare workplaces. Healthcare reform has raised stress levels and conflict because it
hospitals into very different care practice expectations and processes.
Conflict is an important cause of today’s astronomical levels of physician burnout. Conflict pervades
relationships with clinical/work colleagues and bosses, with patients, with spouses or partners, with one’s
children. And with oneself. It fills many physicians with dread – dread of the difficulty of getting things done at
work and at home. Women physicians are much more likely than male colleagues to show symptoms - feeling
emotionally exhausted, depleted, frustrated.
Student-Scholar Partnership
Spring 2016
Project Proposal
And women are much more likely to respond by reducing their hours or leaving the practice. Women physicians
report a much higher problem with conflict over home and family responsibilities. They feel that they are the
ones expected to have greater responsibility for home and family tasks. And these create more places, more
people and greater frequency of conflict for women doctors than for men.
I have trained people in conflict resolution in face-to-face situations. But the model of gathering in a real place at
a specific time just does not work for overworked, stressed physicians. I realize that somehow our clinicians
need access to these capabilities online – meaning, any time, anywhere. Online training in relationship and
leadership capabilities is notoriously very difficult to do well.
This project will plan an online course for early career physicians to gain conflict engagement capability so they
perform better and feel better. We’ll also begin creating course materials.
Together the SSP and I will discuss the following and decide how best to accomplish this and who will work on
which tasks:
- Testing titles to find one that truly meets learners’ needs and wants
- Writing very clear learning objectives that provide what physicians urgently want and need
- Researching other online conflict resolution offerings thoroughly to understand their approaches,
elements, methods and results
- Clarifying what this course uniquely and powerfully offers
- Designing offline activities that enable doctors to really use and learn the skills
- A key element of good training for skills acquisition is the support materials that enable people to
learn what they want exactly when they need to apply it on the job. We’ll explore currently available
support materials, then design ones for this course
- Plan ways to bring doctors together in community online for discussion, improvement and support
I see immediately the SSP can help with the following:
- Research and analyze what courses specifically for physicians already do, how they do it and what
users think of them. This includes the real outcomes for them and their workplaces.
- Present findings in simple table to enable us to identify critical features and to clarify the unique
offer of our course
- Find graphics for webpage and support materials – like homework, resource lists, challenge
activities
In addition, I am considering creating a catalog of hospital programs that aim to reduce physician burnout as a
resource for physicians wanting to improve their employers’ structures, policies, and practices. This may be
something we spend some time on – what is available, how to categorize them in a useful way, how successful
are they, etc.
3. How will your project benefit from the student’s participation?
This project combines
(a) my lifelong research and professional commitment to enabling women to make an impact while leading
lives they love with
(b) using digital interaction because it enables a wider audience and convenient access. However, it is a
notoriously poor way to learn new behaviors and attitudes.
Working with a Brandeis student will help me see this work through the eyes of someone who is likely more
tech-comfy than me and has seen much more, so knows the opportunities better than me. That perspective will
be invaluable.
4. What specific knowledge or skills will the student acquire from carrying out
this work?
The semester goes amazingly fast. We’ll need to discuss options, problems and opportunities comfortably
and efficiently. That means the SSP will
- Use and improve her/his clear concise communication capabilities, essential for collaborating on
projects under tight time limitations
Student-Scholar Partnership
Spring 2016
Project Proposal
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Learn about the power of and problems in relying on a flat medium – internet connectivity – for
behavioral and attitudinal change and improved performance. This includes theories and practice in how
adults really learn and how to support people in what may become profound change.
5.What do you foresee to be the mutual benefits of the mentoring relationship?
I will gain a young person’s perspective in a medium that is new to me and her/his ideas about how to reach
young professionals. That means a lot to me; s/he will improve the quality and value of the course.
My partner will benefit in two ways: (1) the work is concrete and s/he will see what is accomplished.
(2) I am an experienced coach and academic advisor. I enjoy hearing about and, if the person invites it,
discussing career and life choices with college students who have the world as their palette. I recently met with
a young woman who applied to be my SSP (I did not hire her.). I invited her to seek me out if she wanted to talk
about her ideas and progress for a career in healthcare. Her energy and dedication to improving healthcare was
clear. We met and we discussed possible routes for an internship and informational interviews to begin to
identify where she might do the work she considers her mission. It was an amazing conversation for me with a
19 year-old!
Student-Scholar Partnership
Spring 2016
Project Proposal