The GSA 2015-2025 Strategic Plan 

In 2014, GSA set out to create a Strategic Plan to lay out our values and mission for a holistic graduate student experience at CMU. The outcome of that process is the 2015-2025 GSA Strategic Plan, and the subsequent Progress Report published in 2018. These documents guide the work GSA does and advocates for. Check them out by downloading them.

Vision, Mission, and Values

We started this process by re-visiting the core purposes of the GSA and clarifying Our Vision, Mission, and Values. Your GSA Representatives and the GSA Executive Committee crafted these statements in an extensive process: we solicited feedback from Representatives, we reviewed the 34-year history of how GSA has served graduate students, and we synthesized these findings in a multi-day vision-setting process.

Identification of Core Issue Areas

To get a sense of the range of issues impacting graduate students, we solicited feedback from GSA representatives in two rounds–first through a survey in March 2014, and then through collaborative group sessions in September using open space technology. From these two rounds of information-gathering, we identified 8 overarching issue areas that most impact the graduate student experience.

Strategic Planning Retreat

In February 2015, graduate student-led working groups gathered over a day-long retreat to map the landscape of each issue area. We examined what has been done and what we could do better to improve graduate student life, and identified key strategic priorities. The GSA Executive Committee then met in March 2015 to begin outlining specific goals and initiatives based on these retreat outcomes.

2015-2018 Progress Report

In 2018, we set out to analyze our progress on the 10-year strategic plan, and see what we had accomplished in the first 3 years. GSA Executive Committee members from the past 5 years met to discuss the progress for each goal and recommendation in the original plan. This resulted in a new document that contained the information of the original plan, but with progress annotations. It can be downloaded from the link above.