Graduate Education Management System (GEMS)

GEMS is an online financial tracking system that helps to ensure all doctoral-stream students receive their full funding.

GEMS contains a Student/Supervisor Agreement Form for each Temerty Faculty of Medicine Graduate Department. The form is an annual agreement that covers the policies regarding the graduate program, supervision and student funding. The agreement from the student, supervisor and graduate unit indicates intent to abide by the terms and provisions of the Agreement Form.

Information from ROSI/ACORN (student information service) is imported into GEMS each evening.  Please note that changes to awards, registration or person information need to be made directly in ROSI/ACORN (changes cannot be made via GEMS). Any changes made in ACORN will be reflected on GEMS the next day. 

Students with INVITE and REG status on ACORN/ROSI will appear in GEMS. Students with outstanding conditional offers will need to clear their conditions in ROSI before an agreement form can be approved in GEMS.

At present, an agreement form is not required for students in professional Master’s programs as they are not part of the guaranteed funded cohort. 

GEMS has the capability for the application to expand to support future plans such as evaluation frameworks, awards modules and further process automation.

As per the Governing Council's Policy on Student Financial Support (April 1998), the goal of the University of Toronto (U of T) is to give doctoral-stream students multi-year support packages that are competitive with packages offered by peer universities. Since 2000, U of T has taken a major step towards this goal by committing a minimum stipend package amount, which is currently at least $15,000 plus tuition and fees to eligible doctoral-stream students. Full funding is available for up to four or five years for PhD students and up to two years for Master’s doctoral-stream students in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine. For more information, please review the complete policy. 

GEMS is an automatic tool that helps us ensure that this policy is followed for our graduate students. The ability to assure that the full-funding is made to all doctoral-stream students relies on accurate tracking of funding for each student. The collection and analysis of the representative data is annually reported to the Vice-Provost, Students.

Graduate students, supervisors, co-supervisors, graduate units and the Office of the Vice Dean, Research and Health Science Education (RHSE) use GEMS.

Graduate students are doctoral-stream Master’s and PhD students registered in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine. Graduate students will be sent an invitation email from their graduate department to login and complete their Student/Supervisor Agreement Form on GEMS. 

• Please note, students may work together with their supervisor to complete an Agreement Form online. 
• Completing the Agreement Form entails reading all the student/supervisor policies, entering all funding information for the current academic year and consenting to the form agreement.

Supervisors are faculty with a graduate appointment in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, School of Graduate Studies who are supervising a doctoral stream student. Faculty are sent an invitation email from their graduate department to login to GEMS and receive notification emails when their students submit an Agreement Form online. 

Co-Supervisors are faculty with cross-appointment in the Faculty of Medicine. Students who have a co-supervisor are required to record the name of this professor on GEMS. Faculty who are indicated as a co-supervisor on the Agreement Form do not need to sign off on GEMS. 

Graduate units are the various departments within the Temerty Faculty of Medicine who host doctoral stream students. Graduate units are able to access information on all agreements in their department. Graduate units: 

• Are responsible for maintaining and tracking the agreements in the system.
• Send invitation emails to new users and notification emails to students and supervisors to review forms. 
• Make the final approval of Agreement Forms. 
• Are the main contact for GEMS inquiries regarding the agreement details for both students and supervisors.
• Maintain their department's faculty information on GEMS.

RHSE maintains fund names and completes annual updates and funding reports.

To login to GEMS, you will need your UTORid and password. If you need helping setting this up, please contact the Information Commons Help Desk

The graduate unit will invite their students by email to complete the Agreement Form. The email will contain additional instructions, including how to login to GEMS.

Once logged in, the student provides the required information and then submits the form. The supervisor will then receive an email with login instructions and be asked to review and approve their student's submission on GEMS.

The graduate unit will review then review the agreement form and provide final approval and submit the form to RHSE. A final email is sent to the student and supervisor to review the final approved form. 

For more details on this process, please review the GEMS Agreement Form Process.

Your graduate unit and other university offices will send important information, including the invitation to start an agreement on GEMS, to your official University of Toronto email address. It is your responsibility to ensure that your email address, mailing/permanent address, and telephone numbers are up to date at all times on ACORN. 

If you prefer to receive emails to another email account, you can forward emails from your UTORmail to an email account of your choice.  Instructions on how to setup email forwarding are available online. 

No. Some of your base stipend funding will be paid through the University using ACORN/ROSI and will automatically appear on your Agreement Form. Some examples of funds administered through ROSI/ACORN include University of Toronto Fellowships, OGS, QEII-GSST, CGS M, Connaught, OTS, and most OSOTF awards. You do not need to enter these funds on the agreement.

Yes. You must report all funds that are NOT paid through ACORN/ROSI on your agreement.

This includes awards paid at hospitals, research institutes and external agencies. If you are paid from your supervisor's research grant (e.g., supervisor's contribution), then you will need to enter this on your agreement as well.

Note:  Supervisor's Research Grants are denoted with an "*" and located at the beginning of the list, followed by awards.

To add external fund:

• Click the "Add External Fund" button.
• Type a unique identifier (e.g. CIHR) in the External Fund box.  If the acronym does not work, type in a keyword, for example, "Canadian Cancer" for CCSRI Awards.
• Select the correct fund name from the list.
  • Note:  The supervisor's research grants will be listed at the top (e.g., *Supervisor's Research Grant - CIHR), followed by a list of awards/fellowships/scholarships (e.g., CIHR CGS D).
• Enter the funding amount, administrative site (where funding is paid from) and pay period for the current academic year.

If a fund name is not on GEMS, please contact your graduate unit with the following information so that the fund may be added to GEMS:

• Full name of the fund.
• Indicate whether the fund is an award/fellowship/studentship or a supervisor's research grant.

Some awards, such as the NSERC CGS D, are entered on ROSI/ACORN by SGS, RHSE or other U of T offices and you do not need to add these funds on your Agreement. ROSI/ACORN paid awards may not yet be entered on ROSI at the time you are completing your Agreement. If this is the case, please enter a note in the Comment Box in your GEMS Agreement that you are waiting for U of T to add your <award name of $ amount> on ROSI/ACORN.

A list of funds that are NOT paid through ACORN/ROSI (e.g., funds that must be reported on the agreement) is available online.

Grouper uses the UTORmail account associated with the UTORid.  GEMS does not use the email address on HRIS as the two systems don’t talk to each other.

It is possible and simple to have the UTORmail account forward automatically to another address – lots of our administrative MD faculty do that. 

Go to  http://help.ic.utoronto.ca/content/16/162/en/forwarding-email-from-utormail.html  and follow the directions.  The person doing it will need to log in with their UTORid and password so if it is a supervisor, the faculty member will probably want to do it themselves.

Note:  The forwarded email address will show up on the GEMS Email History log.

Unless a user has activated their UTORid, GEMS cannot get the UTORid and email address from LDAP.  They cannot be sent emails from the system and they can’t log in.  See http://tcard.utoronto.ca/activate-your-utorid/ .   That explains why some new students in the GEMS student list are showing up without an email address.