IGE: Track 2: Comparing rotations and direct admissions pathways to graduate education in the sciences: an assessment of policy and practice

This National Science Foundation Innovations of Graduate Education (IGE) Track 2 award to the University of Minnesota will assess the different ways science graduate students are matched with a faculty advisor. Recent reports suggest that graduate students increasingly struggle with their mental health, work-life balance and sense of belonging. Faculty advisors play a core role in the experiences of science graduate students in the United States. They often have significant control over a student’s stipend, workspace, resources, research project, collaborators and, ultimately, time to graduate. The influential position of the advisor makes the choice of advisor pivotal to graduate students’ progress. This project contributes to knowledge about factors affecting graduate student success by investigating the methods used to pair graduate students with an advisor and the impact those methods may have on graduate students’ sense of belonging, intent to persist in their programs, and satisfaction with their advisors. The researchers will explore the experiences of administrators, faculty, and students with the practices and policies of various recruitment methods to identify what pre-existing elements should be removed or modified. The researchers will investigate the experiences of three stakeholder groups (graduate students, faculty advisors, and graduate program coordinators) with different graduate student recruitment methods (e.g., rotations and direct admission) into life sciences, chemistry, and physics. To achieve this goal, the researchers will carry out four interconnected aims. They will use a national survey of graduate students to test the hypothesis that the method of recruitment impacts students’ experiences with their advisors, interest in completing their graduate training and their sense of belonging to their research group and their program. Interviews with three stakeholder groups will be used to fulfill the three remaining aims. Interviews with faculty advisors will provide insights into how different recruitment methods impact their decisions on which students to accept. Graduate program coordinator interviews will provide information about how recruitment methods are implemented in their programs, the challenges with these approaches, and the reasons why a program uses a particular recruitment method or methods. Finally, interviews with graduate students who switched labs will reveal how students navigate program policies about changing advisors and the effect of recruitment methods on this process. Combined, these stakeholder perspectives will reveal affordances and constraints of different recruitment methods allowing for suggestions about policy recommendations and best practices. This work will contribute to knowledge about factors contributing to graduate student success and provide a foundation for programs to make data-informed decisions about recruitment procedures. The Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) program is focused on research in graduate education. The goals of IGE are to pilot, test and validate innovative approaches to graduate education and to generate the knowledge required to move these approaches into the broader community. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.