2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In graduate student-oriented online spaces, students often portray themselves as miserable, depicting these negative themes through combinations of text and images called memes. Memes in this context are a symbolic language that is used to convey cultural ideas through established templates that draw from pop-culture media and various youth subcultures. Through this medium, graduate students share and process their experiences communally, using memes as a coping mechanism. Collectively students tend to acknowledge that the culture around graduate school is bad; however, less is known about how students navigate and respond to this culture. In this paper we use a mixed method design to assess graduate student experience in relation to common stereotypes self-attributed by graduate students in public online communities. The aim of this study is to answer the following questions:

RQ1: How do senior PhD students and recent graduates understand their experience through the lens of common stereotypes about graduate student life?

RQ2: How do these experiences differ between graduate students based on background, positionality, and career trajectory?

In this work, we performed a mixed method study triangulating survey and interview data. We developed a pool of memes and graduate student oriented advice columns then used thematic analysis to identify 9 discrete themes about the graduate student experience. These 9 themes were the basis for a 9-question structured interview protocol and pre-interview survey. Participants (N=15) were recruited through convenience sampling and self-selected from the list of 9 questions which ones to discuss via the pre-interview survey. We present on three of these themes focusing on 1) work-life-balance, 2) imposter syndrome, and 3) burnout. Thematic coding of the interviews was used to triangulate pre-interview survey responses. We found that students generally disagreed with the negative themes of the questions and that memes tended to exaggerate these features of graduate student experience. However, emergent themes of self-efficacy in our analysis demonstrated how student self-beliefs influenced their experience and mental health during graduate school. We also found that graduate students’ perception of their experience is influenced by students’ gender, nationality, and could influence student career trajectories. The results from our work highlight the ongoing concerns with graduate school culture, and how it can disadvantage certain groups. Further, this work can help identify student support mechanisms that can be instituted at the individual, program, and college level to promote student retention and mental health.