Dear ChE Graduate Students,

During the last few Conversations with the School Head, the ChE 690 - Graduate Seminar has been an important subject of discussion. Based on your feedback and after brainstorming with several students, faculty and staff, last year we implemented a number of changes to make this a more meaningful experience:

· allowed students to attend 2 seminars per semester outside the School

· requested speakers to prepare presentations at a reasonable technical level

· put extra effort into scheduling to ensure an even distribution of topics

· invited one industrial speaker per semester.

During the spring 2013 Conversation, it was suggested to introduce a questionnaire to survey each seminar; this will help us to develop a data base of speakers and rank topics, which we hope will lead to further improvement of our Graduate Seminar program.

The questionnaire is now ready and will be distributed after each seminar by Cristina Farmus as a link in an email. Each survey will be active until the date of the following seminar; the responses will be analyzed at the end of each semester and made available to all faculty and graduate students. The responses are anonymous and voluntary, it takes less than one minute to complete the questionnaire.  

I encourage you to complete this survey after each seminar and give us your feedback about how to make this a truly enriching experience of your Purdue ChE graduate studies.

Sincerely,

Arvind Varma
R. Games Slayter Distinguished Professor
Jay and Cynthia Ihlenfeld Head of Chemical Engineering
Purdue University