Empowering Ph.D. Students to Create a Culture that Values Community and Mental Health

What is it about?

Doctoral programs often have high rates of depression, anxiety, isolation, and imposter phenomenon. As a result, graduating students may feel unprepared for research-focused careers, causing many to leave research altogether. Prior work identifies an important contributing factor to this phenomenon: even with prior exposure to research, entering Ph.D. students often have problematically idealized views of science. These preconceptions can become obstacles for students in their own professional growth. Unfortunately, existing curricular and extracurricular programming in many doctoral programs fail to include mechanisms to systematically address students’ misconceptions of their profession. In this work, we describe a new initiative at our institution that aims to address this issue via a mandatory seminar for entering doctoral students. The seminar is designed to build resilience in students by (a) demystifying the "hidden curriculum" of the Ph.D. -- lessons that Ph.D. students inevitably learn through experience (as opposed to through explicit teaching) -- and (b) by teaching students to proactively reflect on and improve the culture in their program.

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Photo by name_ gravity on Unsplash

Photo by name_ gravity on Unsplash