Best Practices
Be proactive. Communicate early and often with your graduate coordinator. Confirm all graduation requirements and deadlines. As a professional courtesy, communicate early with your advisor and committee members (either through a meeting or email) about collecting their signatures for your graduate degree completion forms. Sample messaging is below:
Dear [Insert names of advisor/committee members/graduate coordinator],
I am excited to be applying to graduate next semester! I am reaching out early to let you know I met/corresponded with [insert name of graduate coordinator] to review all the requirements, deadlines, and necessary steps I need to take to graduate next semester. In that meeting/through that correspondence, I was advised to initiate the Graduate School’s electronic degree completion forms at least [insert number of business days prior] to the published Graduate School form deadlines so that all signees have sufficient time to sign forms.
To help facilitate the smooth processing of these forms, you should expect email notifications requesting your electronic signature to come from the following email address: grad_workflow@gradschool.colostate.edu
Please sign and submit all forms sent to you within [insert number of business days]. If your schedule next semester will prevent you from signing the forms within the [insert number of business days] established within our department, please let me know now so I can plan ahead. I also recommend adding grad_workflow@gradschool.colostate.edu to your Safe Senders email list to prevent email notifications from going to your junk or spam folder.
As soon as I initiate my first form, I will send you a quick reminder to expect automated email notifications.
Thank you for your help as I prepare to graduate.