The Student Center for Integrated Education, Research, and Development (CIERD) is a student led organization formed in April of 2004. The initial vision of CIERD came from discussions amongst a group of graduate students representing a wide variety of departments and programs across Duke University .

The mission of CIERD is two-fold. First and foremost, CIERD will foster effective interaction, collaboration, and intellectual exchange between students from all the various departments, programs and schools at Duke University . This interaction represents the fundamental components necessary to achieve the second part of our mission. The second part of CIERDs mission is to facilitate new educational, research and development opportunities in a integrated and interdisciplinary fashion.

The flexibility of CIERDs mission will be its strength. This will allow CIERD to tackle the unstructured problems and new ventures of its members without many of the barriers present in most other administrative structures. Much like the MacArthur foundation fellowship, CIERD prizes exceptional merit and the promise of continued creative work. In order to achieve this, however, we must create an environment for it. CIERD can do this at the student level for Duke University .

CIERD has started out modestly concentrating on a few initial projects which have shown great success. These projects represent the first steps in achieving CIERDs mission, and we're extremely proud of them. The first is the creation of an online forum. It serves as an informal hub and idea exchange area for CIERD members. It can be accessed by going to http://cierd.pratt.duke.edu . It is both free and open to the public. Here people can post and receive comments from their peers about anything they happen to be working on. Both an engineer wondering about business plans for bringing a device to market, and a sociologist looking for some help from a statistician in analyzing survey data can post and find answers to their queries. Every problem, idea, or question can find a home on the forum.

The second project is the ongoing grant writing workshop. Faculty, staff, and administrators from across the university are being tapped to participate in a semester-long grant writing workshop that will aid the development of all the attending students. All students are welcome at any of the sessions and at the conclusion of the workshop, those students who opted to write grants during the workshop will have their grants evaluated and two competitive awards of $500 each will be given to the best grants. So far, the feedback and evaluations have shown that this has been an invaluable workshop for students from across the university. CIERD has every intent of continuing to support this workshop and offering it again. As this is the first time it has been offered, the comments and feedback will be an essential component of making it better for future implementations.

The third project is idea exchange sessions. These sessions will be in an informal setting, usually as a luncheon. A student will prepare beforehand an idea or problem they are currently wrestling with. Some background information will be disseminated to other CIERD members and the larger Duke community before the session. Then, at the luncheon the student will give a short presentation about the body of work or the idea, and lead a discussion with those attending to get perspectives from peers across the entire university. One can immediately see the endless possibilities that come out of this type of event. Collaborations, new interdisciplinary projects, networking etc. All of these events represent good first steps for CIERD. All of them will be student-led and driven, while drawing upon the vast resources of Duke University . But, in order to give CIERD a chance for success we need unilateral support across the university.