2024 Collaborative Network for Engineering & Computing Diversity (CoNECD)

Navigating the conflict resolution process as a graduate student can be daunting, confusing, and time-consuming. Whether it is regarding conflicts with peers, instructors, or faculty advisors, students may face negative consequences to their mental health and well-being from the stress of unaddressed, or poorly addressed, conflicts. These stressors and mental health concerns are further exacerbated for underrepresented and marginalized students due to already present biases they face in academia. Therefore, this work sought to better understand the conflict resolution process at an R1 institution with a focus on the issues faced by graduate students, particularly those who are minorities in engineering and science disciplines. This presentation will focus on the development of an interactive, open-source Conflict Resolution Navigator tool to increase agency for students navigating conflict at their university.

From both surveying and holding workshops with graduate students, we found graduate students: (i) did not have a clear understanding of their rights and appropriate standards of behavior of graduate advisors, (ii) were unaware of the appropriate pathways for addressing conflicts, and (iii) did not have clear expectations of the conflict resolution process nor its outcomes. The initial prototype of the Conflict Resolution Navigator tool was built to address these issues by (i) helping students identify concerns, (ii) providing students with information on the Georgia Tech conflict resolution process for a given concern, and (iii) giving students an idea of what to expect during each step of the conflict resolution process.

Information for the tool was gathered through interviews with university administrators and human resources (HR) representatives as well as through investigating existing university policies. From the interviews, we learned that many of those working in positions to help students navigate the conflict resolution process were oftentimes untrained and unaware of relevant personnel, policies, and processes to do so. We also found the way university policies are written and interpreted often leave graduate students particularly vulnerable and unprotected during the conflict resolution process.

To test the impact of the Conflict Resolution Navigator tool, a group of underrepresented graduate students were presented with two hypothetical conflict scenarios and asked to use the tool to guide them. After using the tool, the number of students willing to pursue the university’s conflict resolution process nearly doubled. Results from initial testing of the Conflict Resolution Navigator prototype suggest the tool may increase agency of graduate students navigating conflict, while the overall confidence students had in the university to effectively handle their concerns showed a negligible improvement. These findings suggest gaps in the perceived effectiveness of the university’s conflict resolution processes and opportunities for the tool to aid in identifying and initiating changes to systemic issues and policies to improve accessibility and equity for graduate students.