How Not to Suck at Graduate School
The following is a guest post by Jessica Calarco. The idea of the hidden curriculum has a long history in sociology. As with most sociological terms see also: culture, social capital, organization, structure, etc. From preschool to postdocs.
They offer on-site individual counseling for students, couples, and families (one The group experience “lets them know that other people share the same struggles and PhD, a co-leader of the Black Women’s Support group, says, “Learning to such as to develop healthy dating , manage stress, enhance relationships.
To support our nonprofit science journalism, please make a tax-deductible gift today. When Carolyn Virca embarked on her chemistry Ph. Virca, who is now a postdoc at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, got through her initial feelings of social isolation by bonding with women who had started the program a year or two ahead of her. But the experience made her appreciate how students could get lost if they feel like outsiders during graduate school.
Women with no female peers were 12 percentage points less likely to complete their degrees within 6 years than men in the same cohort. As for the underlying reasons, there is no definitive answer—although the researchers did not find any evidence that academic performance or grant funding played a substantive role. Students usually drop out because of some other factor besides intellectual ability, such as poor advising, a toxic climate, or because they want to pursue other options, Gardner says.
And systemic problems have to be dealt with at the institutional level. Most of the students who dropped out did so within the first 3 years of their program. The data in the new paper tell part of the story. Williams wonders whether the female students experienced a toxic climate—sexual harassment, demeaning jokes, dismissal of their ideas in lab meetings—or something subtler, such as social isolation.
