Locating a Graduate Program on the Internet

Parks & Recreation, Nov, 1998 by William L. Obenour, Susan Mary Wilson

Required and elective courses are another common item that departments will display. These displays varied from a listing of course titles (Florida State University) to a catalogue description (SIU). Some departments expected the Web searcher to request a graduate catalogue be mailed (BU), which seemed strange since the Internet has the capability to provide this information online.

Other departments linked their course titles to the university's list of online graduate catalogues containing complete course descriptions. If this linkage is easily made (University of Georgia), it is simple to locate the fall course description. But for some sites, it was difficult and cumbersome to find the university's graduate catalogue (Universities of Mississippi and South Alabama). A prospective student can usually expect that required courses will be taught on a regular basis, but as experienced graduate students are well aware, this is not always the case. Generally, this information was not available, although the SIU site provided course material from the forthcoming two semesters.

Money -- or in this case assistantships -- is always a source of great concern for graduate students. Information provided on assistantships (number of assistantships, departmental vs. grants, stipend amount) varied by university. SIU provided detailed information and, as an added bonus, a graduate-assistant orientation with the names, telephone numbers, and office hours of graduate assistants. MSU also provided e-mail addresses and links to the home pages of all current graduate students. In some cases, a lack of information left us wondering if assistantships existed, or if the site simply was missing the information. Additional requirements to obtain an assistantship, such as the University of North Carolina at Greensboro's stipulation of mandatory interviews for all assistantship applicants, should be noted. In addition, some departments were linked to university- or college-wide scholarship opportunities (University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana and Murray State).

While all of the sites provided sufficient applicant requirement information, some schools furnished students with additional data. For instance, UConn noted the graduate research projects for its Laboratory for Leisure, Tourism, and Sport. The University of Wisconsin at LaCrosse includes not only the authors and titles of past theses but the names of committee members. UConn and Florida noted commonly affiliated cognate departments that could assist the applicant in evaluating interdisciplinary resources of the university for courses, research interests, and interdisciplinary committee members. In response to students' concerns regarding a professional future upon securing a master's degree, Aurora University included the percentage of master's students placed in permanent professional positions. Few recreation-department-oriented sites in the East noted graduate computer facilities, and surprisingly few offered links to area attractions such as national parks, city tourist pages, or other local attractions. Indiana University, however, did provide a link to "Welcome to Bloomington," which highlights the local area. SIU also provided links to community attractions on its home page. This important feature was often overlooked.