Since the Fall Break of 2017, the ZSR Library has hosted a workshop series for graduate students. The idea came from a presentation panel at ACRL 2017 in Baltimore, where Kennesaw University described a fall break graduate student “boot camp.” In 2020, thanks to a suggestion by one of our presenters, we rebranded the program into the Graduate Student Research Retreat, offering graduate students a series of four to five workshops and replaced our box lunches with a healthy buffet lunch on the Thursday of Fall Break. With Fall Break moving from a Thursday/Friday to a Monday/Tuesday this year, it seemed like a good time to try a new model! Since the biomedical graduate students have always struggled to attend these sessions due to conflicts with their classes, for 2025, these workshops were moved to a series of weeknight sessions, with some held on the Reynolda campus and some hosted at Wake Downtown. Pizza was served after each workshop.

Twenty-one students across both campuses attended these workshops, spread out across three weeks in September. Topics included: Addressing Writer’s Block, Time Management, and AI Tools for Research and Citation Tools for Organizing and Citing Sources. This new model increased participation across both campuses. For the spring semester, we hope to repeat these workshops, add some new ones, and offer some sessions on Zoom to reach even more WFU graduate students. You can check out a few photos from the event on ZSR’s Flickr.