The Role of Department Staff

The primary role of divisionally-funded department staff is to provide administrative support for the department’s academic mission. This includes responsibilities such as advising, curriculum planning, course scheduling, enrollment management, as well as overseeing department finances, space, and academic personnel matters.

Given this focus, administrative staff are not responsible for supporting research projects, research related purchases, special programs or events, summer programs, or similar initiatives. While staff maybe be able to provide guidance and referrals to appropriate resources, they should not be expected to manage or execute the administrative tasks associated with research activities.

Thank you for your cooperation in ensuring that department staff can effectively fulfill their core responsibilities.

The grad advisor provides graduate advising and administrative support for the Astronomy Department. Principal functional areas include; academic advising (degree requirements, academic milestones), making referrals to specialized campus offices for student services; administrating recruitment and admissions; executing graduate student financial support; student records; and administrative department support as necessary.  Professional and Development support for grad students and postdocs is a role provided by the Graduate Division along with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Graduate Studies at UC Santa Cruz which advances initiatives for minoritized graduate student support across multiple campus-wide projects, as well as providing direct support to students, staff, faculty, and programs. 

Current Department Staff roles are: 

• Department Manager

• Graduate Program Advisor/Administrator

• Department Administrative Assistant (Part-time)

In addition, the following programs are supported by the Astronomy Programs Coordinator which is funded with non-Division funds: 

Astrobiology Institute

OWL (Other Worlds Laboratory)

Osterbrock Graduate Leadership Program

Two things faculty can do that are of great help to the Department Staff:

• Respond to emails promptly. 

• Observe deadlines. Not meeting deadlines is starting to have more and more consequences. For every follow-up email we send you, department staff receive tenfold from various sources all over campus. 

An excessive amount of time is spent by staff on follow-ups and keeping track of all the follow-ups.

Lastly, understand that many of the tasks we do rely on someone else from another unit(s).  Many of these units face the same challenges all over campus, open positions, understaffed, and high turnover.