 |
SURVEYORS: Grad student leaders
Miller, Chang, Moriah Thomason and Rob Siston,
MS ’02, quizzed their colleagues.
Linda A. Cicero |
according to some 2,300 graduate
students who responded to an online survey last year,
academic life on the Farm is generally satisfying. What’s
more, about 90 percent of them would choose to attend
Stanford if they had to make the choice a second time.
“When you look at the results, there are a lot
of very positive things, and there are some things that
students are unhappy with,” says Luke Miller,
a second-year doctoral student in education who co-authored
a report about the 2004 Graduate Academic Life Survey
with education graduate students Donna Winston and David
Waddington, both MA ’04. Miller, who is a member
of the Graduate Student Council, presented the survey
results to the Faculty Senate in February.
The survey aimed to identify strengths and weaknesses
in graduate academic life and to generate conversations
that could help change University policies. It posed
182 questions about course work, academic advising,
the PhD qualifying process, dissertation research, the
academic environment and career preparation. The response
rate of 32 percent was high compared to previous attempts
to survey the graduate student body.
Nonetheless, Miller and other members of the survey
committee note concerns about whether the responses
are representative. “One, do you have only people
who are upset, and therefore the results are painting
a bleaker picture than it actually is?’ Miller
asks. “Or, two, it could be that the people who
are unhappy are, like, ‘There’s nothing
that’s going to improve my situation, so I don’t
care about this survey.’ Then you only have the
happy people responding.”
The idea for a survey emerged in winter quarter of 2003,
when then-GSC chair Grace Chang spoke to the Faculty
Senate about academic issues that concerned graduate
students, including adviser-student relationships and
the quality of teaching. Faculty wanted more information,
so the senate’s committee on graduate studies
formed a subcommittee to develop a survey. In February
2004, an e-mail request to take the online survey was
sent to all graduate students.
“It was an incredibly challenging project,”
says Chang, ’92, MS ’94, who estimates that
she put in 1,000 hours on the survey during her third
year of medical school. But it was also, she adds, “entirely
a labor of idealism based on the hope of improving the
graduate experience.” Chang would like to see
an ongoing effort that would survey students every few
years.
Committee members, chaired by education professor Eamonn
Callan, decided to analyze responses to 41 questions
they thought might influence the design of new policies
and programs. A representative question: “How
satisfied are you with your current academic adviser’s
ability to mentor you?” The raw data have not
been released, to protect student confidentiality, but
each school has its own chapter in the report.
Miller and Callan’s school, Education, came out
well, with a 51 percent response rate. More than 80
percent of those surveyed were satisfied with the overall
quality of their courses, and 74 percent were satisfied
with their advisers. Their main areas of concern—shared
by survey respondents in other schools—were conflicts
with advisers and the clarity of the process of the
PhD qualifying exam.
“I wasn’t surprised by that at all,”
says School of Education Dean Deborah Stipek. “The
qualifying-exam process is unclear to faculty, and we’re
actually having a retreat [to discuss] that. It’s
not just a communication problem.”
Stipek says the survey is “a very valuable resource,”
and she’s considering forming focus groups to
address some of the issues that appear to need attention.
“In some degree, it confirmed where we have work
to do, and in some degree it told me I wasn’t
quite understanding [some issues] from my more informal
approaches to getting feedback from students.”
Miller, who is researching teacher labor markets in
rural New York for his dissertation, falls in the “very
satisfied” cohort when he’s asked about
the impact of the survey. “What we wanted to do
was to generate a document that could generate conversations
in various schools and departments about things they
can do to improve their programs.” |
