WashU will have a clearer view of doctoral candidate progress, funding and support with the new PhD functionality in Workday.
Faculty and staff at our five schools with PhD programs (Arts & Sciences, Brown, McKelvey, School of Medicine and Olin) will have greater visibility into the data that will help them manage the PhD journey for their students.
Many systems to one
Although we have university-wide continuity in our PhD program policies, schools and departments maintain their own PhD program data in separate systems like SIS, databases, spreadsheets and paper files. This makes it difficult to get a good picture of student progress, and there’s a heavy administrative burden to determine if students have met their degree requirements. There’s also a lack of visibility into PhD funding, especially outside funding, such as stipends, grants and fellowships.
“In Workday Student, we’ll be able to manage PhD funding transactions, academic requirements, and advisor and dissertation support teams – all in one system,” said Kathy Steiner-Lang, Student Sunrise advising functional lead. “We’ll be able to track PhD students’ work on campus outside of their programs through reports. We’ll also have the ability to track leaves of absence, withdrawals and returns from leaves using business processes in Workday. While Workday won’t solve all issues related to PhD students, it’s an improvement on the university’s current systems.”
Strategic design partnership
The PhD functionality enhancements that are in place for go-live were shaped with WashU’s input. We helped Workday clarify its vision for doctoral research support by participating in a Workday Strategic Design Partner Group. Workday invited WashU and other clients from R1 research universities to join the group and share how they manage their doctoral research programs. Sunrise formed a group of experts from our PhD programs to collect and summarize the information Workday needed.
“We had an active PhD Working Group and learned a great deal about how our PhD programs are unique,” said Kathy. “Our discussions served a dual purpose. Sunrise used the information to design and configure the PhD requirements in the new system, and we were able to tell Workday what enhancements we’d like to see in future product releases.”
Workday Student is an evolving product, and as strategic design partners, we will continue to provide our feedback to Workday about desired functionality enhancements.
PhD milestones to accomplishments in Workday
What we think of as PhD milestones today will be maintained as accomplishments in Workday, and those accomplishments will be used when defining academic requirements for our PhD programs. The four standard Workday accomplishment types are: dissertation, thesis, performance and project.
Workday recently enhanced its functionality to provide universities with greater flexibility in defining and managing accomplishments. We’ve created a standardized list of Master’s and PhD accomplishments that the schools can use, and we’ve determined which of those accomplishments can be added to transcripts. As we learn more about the use of these accomplishments, we can decide whether to add more accomplishments. Examples of newly added accomplishment types include research rotations completed and departmental requirements met. Workday also has portfolio functionality that can be used to record publications and conference presentations that are not part of students’ academic requirements.
The Office of the University Registrar will be responsible for maintaining the accomplishment types and academic requirements. Sunrise is undergoing a process of gathering PhD academic requirements from the schools and mapping students’ PhD milestones in SIS to accomplishments in Workday to minimize data entry into the new system. School registrars will manage the accomplishments on student records and make updates as they are completed.
PhD financials in one place
WashU commits to funding PhD students, and funding comes from a variety of sources, internal and external. Unfortunately, in current state, schools don’t have easy visibility to this funding, especially when students are funded outside of their home school. It’s difficult to confirm if students are paid at the right level, when they should be paid and when they shouldn’t be, such as when the student is no longer enrolled and funding ends.
In Workday, all funding transactions will be in one system. Remissions for programs will post to a clearing account, and if paid by a grant, departments will do journal entries to reclass those grants. This will keep the student account cleaner, which means correct 1098Ts, and it allows departments more time to make decisions on funding.
Advising team collaboration
Several advisor types may be used in the PhD context in Workday. They are: academic advisor, faculty advisor, research advisor, dissertation advisor, dissertation committee member, peer advisor, and peer support advisor. We can create cohorts for various types of advisors and give visibility to student advising notes in a shared environment so that a PhD candidate’s support team can collaborate to support that candidate. Advisors who are actively involved in the evaluation of PhD students will have access to the evaluation notes as students progress through their programs.
Using functionality available to all
PhD programs will be able to take advantage of functionality available to all students in Workday, including academic plans, academic progress report functionality, and program of study concentrations and specializations. The academic plan will allow students and advisors to work together to identify planned coursework for these highly individualized programs, while the academic progress report shows the status of completion of each of the requirements for the degree, including non-course types of requirements, such as qualifiers, rotations and dissertation milestones. By setting up concentrations and specializations in programs of study, manual work related to academic requirements can be reduced.
Watch our Workday Student Sneak Peek webinar recordings to learn more about Advising and Academic Planning in Workday.
Future roadmap
Although system configuration is closed for now, we will consider making other enhancements after the system is fully installed in Fall 2025. Here are a few examples of what’s on our roadmap for future development:
We are piloting a new approach to track mentored experiences, such as mentored teaching and professional experiences, that will call for reconfiguration of this requirement in Workday. We are looking at standardizing some forms in use for PhD processes, that are now in paper or in Docusign, and setting them up in Workday. We also know that we need a better connection between Workday Student and Workday HCM/FIN to handle activities like pausing funding when PhD candidates engage in professional development opportunities outside of their program of study and to provide better reporting on student stipends. We will continue to explore our options and look for better solutions to improve our administrative capabilities in Workday.