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In response to budgetary crises, academic libraries are often forced to relegate traditionally professional librarian duties to student assistants, paraprofessionals, and other support staff. Among the newly transferred roles is collection development including the analysis, selection, and maintenance of materials and resources. Review of the literature reveals that this trend has substantially grown over past years; however, the scope and level of responsibility of the transferred projects has been limited. Additionally, the literature severely lacks mention of the roles played by graduate students working in academic libraries, while pursuing their MLIS degrees. The objective of this session is to explore the use of graduate student assistants working toward their MLIS degree in the conduction of complex collection evaluation, selection, and analysis from the perspective of one graduate student assistant and one professional academic librarian. The attendees will learn about the benefits of involving graduate student assistants in the collection development process, in terms of the need to acquire hands on experience prior to first-time professional employment, issues of current subject specialty knowledge, curatorial objectivity, and professional development in the mentor-mentee relationship.