Please find below a message from Dean Zingraff concerning the need to schedule spring 2012 dissertation defenses as soon as possible. If you are defending your dissertation this semester and have not yet scheduled it, please confer with your advisor to set a date (and then see Laura to process the scehduling and get the room) as soon as possible:

Dear Colleagues,

Please note the message that was sent to graduate program directors and coordinators this morning. Creative Services must have our information Monday, April 2. Their due date has been on April 1 or close to it for several years now.

Currently, a large number of doctoral students have filed an intent to graduate in May but we have scheduled very few defenses. Please ask your faculty to work with their students to set a date as soon as possible and submit the information on-line by way of the dissertation data base. If, at the moment, the best guess of the faculty member is "my student will defend sometime between today and the last day possible to submit the dissertation to the library and take the degree in May" the dissertation defense information should be entered into the data base using May 4, 2012 as the defense date. Thanks. [mz]