Corporate Chef Kurt Kwiatkowski places ingredients into a food processor Tuesday at the McDonel Hall Community Kitchen. Free cooking lessons were provided to graduate students because it is National Graduate Student Appreciation Week. Katie Stiefel/The State News
A week devoted to recognizing graduate and professional students kicked off yesterday with the Council of Graduate Students, or COGS, rolling out numerous events to recognize graduate students.
Free MSU Dairy Store ice cream and a cooking demonstration are a few of the events COGS is providing to graduate and professional students, which include students earning their doctoral or medical degrees.
“There’s a whole range of different things that will be going on, so we’re very excited about that,” COGS President Stefan Fletcher said.
Graduate and Professional Student Appreciation Week runs as a national event from April 1-5, with universities showing their gratitude for the services graduate and professional students provide.
The event was created by the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students.
While events at a national level run until Friday, the event will extend until April 11 at MSU, COGS Director of Event Planning Lexi MacMillan said.
“We put in a lot of work into this year’s (event),” MacMillan said. “We were just trying to come up with almost as much as we could for the next two weeks.”
Fletcher said this year will have more activities for students to engage in, deciding to more than double last year’s five days of celebrations.
The decision to add more activities and giveaways to the event was made after Fletcher took a trip to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to take part in their graduate student appreciation week festivities.
“I met with my counterparts out there and really saw that they had put on a stellar offering,” Fletcher said. “COGS hadn’t really done much before for that week, so really we’ve been the last couple years (stepping) up our game.”
For graduate student Rui Chen, the appreciation week is something he plans to finally take advantage of after four years of not doing so and is excited to get out of the lab for some fun.
“I’m definitely really honored,” Chen said at the appreciation week’s opening cooking event.
“It’s a change in the environment (and is) something fun so we’re not always in our data or experiments.”
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