The Importance of Graduate Student Engagement in a Campus Language Diversity Initiative

In 2012, North Carolina State University launched a campus-wide linguistic diversity program, “Educating the Educated,” with a goal of engaging the campus community about language as a key element of diversity and increasing general knowledge of language and dialect differences. The program has successfully grown over the past several years since its launch, in large part due to the leadership efforts of the program’s student ambassadors. Student ambassadors are involved in peer education on campus, seek out opportunities to engage the campus and local communities, and develop partnerships on campus with existing organizations to enhance diversity education efforts with the inclusion of language diversity. A majority of these student ambassadors are graduate students in the linguistics Masters program. In this paper, we discuss the importance of the student ambassadors to the success of the program in terms of their contributions and advancement of program objectives. We also highlight the importance of graduate students being engaged on their campus, drawing from higher education research literature on graduate student engagement and the critical role it plays in academic and professional development