Departments can help students by building community

Imagine this: Your academic department hosts weekly or biweekly Zoom meetings. Each time, one former student is celebrated, their career highlighted. A current student or faculty member asks interview questions such as

• “What’s the most fun part of your work?”
• “What’s most meaningful about it?”
• “What would surprise grad student you?”

Everyone in the department, past and present, is invited. (And others too, as space permits.) If the department is small, they can join forces with colleagues in similar fields, or even with a department in the same field but at a different institution.

All former students are celebrated; there’s no “well, she doesn’t do history anymore” or “he’s no longer working in science.” Everyone’s invited, including adjuncts, postdocs, professors, and all the rest, no matter how far removed from academia or the discipline their careers now seem.

And when I say “former students,” I mean that — it doesn’t matter if someone graduated with a PhD or left after one semester.

There are only a few rules

The rules for these meetings are simple: One former student per session (no panels). No presentations. Standard interview questions. There’s training available for interviewers, so they feel confident and comfortable. Every week has a faculty host, tech support person, interviewer, and invited interviewee. These can be as short as 30 minutes, if time’s an issue.

And this one’s not a rule, but it is a norm: Everyone attends, at least some of the time. That includes professors and students and anyone else who’s involved in teaching or research or programming in the department.

Here are a few more questions:

• “What advice would you give folks interested in doing this kind of work now?”
• “What advice would you give to advisors, the department, or the university more generally?”
• “What did I miss that you want to make sure we cover?”

Why this works, for everyone

Everyone likes talking about themselves and giving advice. They love a chance to reflect and consider — doing so is fun and meaningful. And that means the interviews will be too for engaged audience members.

Imagine the department that did this for a semester, a year, even two. Imagine what a department that did this on the regular for five or ten years would be like. All invited! All celebrated! Their own former students. This is the future we want, isn’t it? Just imagine it.

Here’s what a couple PhDs shared with me about their experiences with similar programming:

https://twitter.com/academic_happy/status/1438301512984301569

https://twitter.com/KateBradfordSci/status/1438306211288518656

Amazing, eh? This kind of programming can be life-changing in the best way for students, and I’m willing to bet it’d help departments with recruitment and retention, both of students and faculty members.

Graduate school is temporary, but departments can build an inclusive community that connects folks for many years and helps students launch and grow awesome careers.