Calling all I-O Program Directors (and Other Interested I-O Faculty)!

Adriane M. F. Sanders

Did you know there is a community of master’s and doctoral program directors that meets regularly during the school year to hash out challenges in our programs, share resources and information, and provide support and encouragement? It’s called the I-O Program Directors Alliance (IOPDA).

We began meeting in 2020 under the guidance of the incomparable unifier Juliet Aiken, and I took over for her sometime the following year. Early on we pulled all program director names off SIOP’s Graduate Program Finder page and emailed to see if they wanted to attend our meetings. We started our own listserv that we could manage in house rather than through APA. After that big recruitment push, awareness of our group became more word of mouth. We have some upcoming plans for a new recruitment push and ideas on how we can ensure folks know we exist should they want to join. Every annual conference we find some additional directors that didn’t know about us and wished they had!

Our combined efforts have resulted in meaningful impacts for programs, including drafting materials and providing volunteers who were instrumental in working with Lewis-Burke Associates to get the I-O Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) code on the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Register of STEM designated degree programs. We also help each other with various benchmarking efforts and resource requests that our institutions like to throw at us as well as having meaningful conversations about recruitment and selection in our programs, emerging trends in higher ed, modern student challenges and needs, as well as network and share information from our various volunteer activities in SIOP and other professional organizations. 

I wanted to put a little plug in before fall semester starts so that you can add our meetings to your calendar if you’d like! People drop in as they’re able, whenever they’re able. It is a very welcoming and inclusive group—that’s how it started and what we value.

IOPDA meets for an hour via Zoom, the second Monday of each month at noon central time. Our first meeting of fall 2024 is September 9.

If you’re interested, you can email me (sandersAM@apsu.edu) to get the Zoom link for the meetings and how to join our listserv. (FYI, I’m on summer break and will likely batch these emails, but I WILL get you all the info you need before our first meeting!)

We hope you’ll join us!