First Year Of Graduate School Research Articles

Can coaching bridge the gap for incoming Latinx graduate students?

ABSTRACT Attrition rates in the first two years of graduate school are high and ∼50% higher for underrepresented students. Here we evaluate an online group coaching intervention using a controlled and an experimental group to determine its impact on skills that are likely predictors of student success, namely the Hallmark of Success indices developed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Our intervention includes eight online coaching sessions (four prior to the first year of graduate school and four during the first year of graduate school). Coaching group sessions, led by certified coaches, address Resilience, Risk and Protective Factors, Accountability, Leadership, Teamwork, Professional Networking, and Self-Assessment. We evaluated the change in Hallmark of Success indices with a pre- and post-questionnaire of 44 items used to assess students’ self-evaluation in nine areas. Students in the experimental coaching group showed a significant increase in the Hallmark of Success indices in seven out of nine areas of student performance between the pre- and post-questionnaires compared to the null model of no changes between time periods. In addition, in all of the nine indices of success, we noted significant differences between the pre- and post-surveys for the experimental group. Our experimental design shows that our cost-effective coaching model improves student performance as perceived by the students.

"Your Family is Always With You": Perceptions of Parental Relationships Among Hispanic/Latinx Young Adults Pursuing STEM Careers.

Hispanic/Latinx young adults remain significantly underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, yet the role families play in these young adults' trajectories in STEM is still underexamined. The purpose of this study was to examine the relational supports and constraints that Hispanic/Latinx college students in STEM majors experienced with their parents as they moved through college and transitioned into their first year of graduate school or full-time employment. Two rounds of interviews were conducted with 18 Hispanic/Latinx young adults who were part of an undergraduate STEM program at a Hispanic-majority university. Most of the study participants reported benefiting from immense emotional support from their parents; however, this emotional support was often simultaneously coupled with home-school value conflicts and a dynamic we call "conversational constraints." Results from this study point to important interventions involving family that might improve the rates of participation of Hispanic/Latinx students from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds in STEM fields.

IN MEMORIAM: Terry T. Marsh (25 July 1938 – 30 July 2021)

Asian Perspectives, Vol. 62, No. 2 © 2023 by the University of Hawai‘i Press. IN MEMORIAM Terry T. Marsh (25 July 1938 – 30 July 2021) Terry Marsh excavating at Spirit Cave, Thailand, in early March 1971 (Photograph by Chet Gorman, courtesy of Joyce White and the Institute for Southeast Asian Archaeology, University of Pennsylvania Museum) On 30 July 2021, Terry T. Marsh passed away at the age of 83 at his home in Auckland, New Zealand. An archaeologist who was as ubiquitous as he was mystic, Marsh had participated in excavations and research at some of the best-known sites in mainland Southeast Asia during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although he published only a few archaeological reports, his interest, kindness, friendship, and dedication made a significant contribution to our knowledge of Thailand and mainland Southeast Asian prehistory. Marsh attended undergraduate school at Sacramento State College (now California State University, Sacramento) in 1958 – 1962. He graduated in spring 1962 with a B.A. in Fine Arts, specifically ceramics. It was during college that Marsh became friends with Chester “Chet” F. Gorman. They were housemates, along with several other students, in a rented home near campus. Although Marsh did not formally graduate with an anthropology degree from Sacramento State College, his journey to archaeology, anthropology, and Thailand began almost immediately after graduation. In spring 1962, Gorman had just finished his first year of graduate school in the Department of Anthropology, University of Hawai‘i when he sent Marsh a telegram that simply Early online release of article in press. stated: “SUMMER WORK CAVE EXPLORATION OUTER ISLANDS COME IMMEDIATELY.”1 Marsh answered the call, and his journey to Southeast Asia began. While in Hawai‘i, Marsh surveyed lava tubes with Gorman as part of a U.S. government project investigating the use of these caves as nuclear fallout shelters. Once their survey was completed, presumably in 1962, Marsh later wrote in an unpublished personal memoir that he “sort of forgot to go home.” He continued working in survey for the same company on various projects throughout the islands. After Gorman returned from his first season of archaeological survey in northeast Thailand in 1964, he and Marsh began living in another rented, shared house infamously known as “Sutton’s Place.” For all its raucousness, living at Sutton’s Place put Marsh in contact with several other anthropologists and archaeologists who were colleagues or friends of Gorman’s at the University of Hawai‘i. One of these housemates-turned-friends was an archaeologist named Donn Bayard. Given Marsh’s background in ceramics and experience working in survey throughout Hawai‘i, it was no surprise that Bayard asked Marsh to assist him when he returned to northeast Thailand in 1968 for the second season of archaeological excavation at a prominent site called Non Nok Tha. Marsh’s travel to northeast Thailand was an adventure. Excavations began at Non Nok Tha in early February 1968, so Marsh likely left Hawai‘i in late 1967 or January 1968. Either way, after booking a berth on a passenger ship from Honolulu to Hong Kong, he immediately became seasick. Medicine helped – after an initial refusal to take it which he blamed on being “a young male” – but Marsh later recalled that the vessel would roll so violently that the swimming pool would slosh and spill over the sides of the ship. Marsh also noted that the vessel had a herd of cattle in the hold which he enjoyed visiting. He also enjoyed later eating them during any one of the six daily meals served on the ship. Marsh’s memoirs and notes are full of food descriptions – he clearly enjoyed eating, trying new experiences, and immersing himself in new cultures. His flair for writing helped capture these moments. After arriving in Hong Kong, Marsh caught another passenger ship which was sailing for Singapore, but once landed, decided that, since he “was on the same landmass as Thailand,” it would be possible to buy a Honda 90 motorbike and ride north. Marsh was able to cross the SingaporeMalaysian border without incident, but once he reached the border with Thailand his fortunes changed. He was not allowed to cross and...

Supremely Influential: How The Man That Once Was Whizzer White Shaped My Career

Supremely Influential:How The Man That Once Was Whizzer White Shaped My Career Helen J. Knowles-Gardner (bio) "He graduated from Yale Law School; he served in the Navy in World War II; and he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University …" Introducing my "law and courts" students to the extraordinary biography of Byron R. White usually begins with these observations. Although this summary of his accomplishments is traditionally prefaced with a statement saying that White had a "résumé you pretty much can't beat," I still have not captured my students' attention. Yale Law seems several worlds away for them; World War II is ancient history; and they have no idea what a Rhodes Scholar is. So, I continue. "Deputy Attorney General during the presidency of John F. Kennedy; and then one of Kennedy's appointments to the Supreme Court of the United States in 1962, serving on that Court until 1993." Some of the students are now impressed. "Oh," I then casually remark, "and he played in the N.F.L." Now I have the attention of all of the students, attention generally confirmed with numerous exclamations of "whoa" or "say what?" While I love bringing Justice Byron R. White to life in this manner, I always feel rather ashamed at doing so. Ashamed, because I have the distinct feeling that White is sitting in the corner of the classroom politely trying not to roll his eyes in frustration that yet another person has capped off their description of his lifetime of accomplishments with reference to his athletic achievements. In 1935, a Denver Post journalist "saddled" the rising college football star White "with a name he did not seek, did not like, and could not shake."1 Much to White's dismay, [End Page 95] the name "Whizzer White"—and all that it embodied—stuck with him, through thick and thin. Far too frequently journalists were wont to undermine (not necessarily deliberately, sometimes just carelessly) the man's legal, political, and judicial accomplishments by reminding their readers of the notable fact that "Whizzer" White had once been a standout on the gridiron. My shame does not last long, however, for the simple reason that "Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States and N.F.L. player" is a unique biographical description that has, over the years, etched itself into the memories of my students, and captivated their attention, just like it did for me during the winter of 2000. I was in my first year of graduate school, and had very quickly reached the conclusion that studying Supreme Court politics and history was my educational raison d'être. At the end of my first semester, I sought out suitable winter break reading material at the local bookstore. Little did I know that one of my purchases was a book that would have a truly significant influence on my career. The book captivated my attention and burned one of its central arguments (and a good many anecdotes and useful pieces of information) into my memory in a way very few books have ever done (and likely ever will). That aptly titled biography of White—The Man Who Once Was Whizzer White—(hereinafter referred to as Whizzer White), written by one of the Justice's former clerks, Dennis Hutchinson, is the book in question. At the end of the Prologue to that volume, Hutchinson recalls White's mid-career observation that, "[j]udges have an exaggerated view of their role in our polity."2 I do not have an "exaggerated view" of the "role" that Whizzer White has played in shaping and influencing my own research, scholarship, and teaching. It has been, and always will be supremely influential. An Influence On My Researching My original marginalia, circa January 2001, begin to appear in the pages of chapters eleven and twelve of my well-thumbed copy of Hutchinson's book (back then, I was less prone to extensive annotation and page corner-folding of volumes). There is one noticeable exception, however. A solitary, pencil-written exclamation point appears next to the paragraph at the top of page three. And it is there that we find the second thing...

Lower SES PhD students experience interpersonal disconnection from others both inside and outside of academia

AbstractStudents from lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds can experience stigma in undergraduate educational settings but little research on this topic has been conducted at the PhD level. Lower‐SES PhD students may feel lower levels of social integration as they experience incidents of interpersonal disconnection from others inside and outside of academia. Interpersonal disconnection may be a mechanism by which lower‐SES leads to a lower sense of social integration. In this prospective study of first‐year PhD students at three North American universities (N = 608), we assessed students’ perceived social integration and their interpersonal perceptions inside and outside of academia 2–8 times throughout their first year of graduate school. Relative to higher‐SES students, lower‐SES students perceived lower levels of social integration. They had difficulty making academic friends, felt dissimilar to their academic peers, and perceived a lack of understanding about their work in graduate school from non‐academic families and friends. They also lost non‐academic social ties. These interpersonal disconnections prospectively mediated the association between lower SES and lower levels of perceived social integration. Lower‐SES PhD students are at risk of impaired interpersonal relationships. Institutional policies to promote social connections among PhD students may help lower‐SES students integrate into academia.

Short Breaks Are for Hot Chocolate, Long Breaks Are for Salads, Weekends Are for Baking

Short Breaks Are for Hot Chocolate, Long Breaks Are for Salads, Weekends Are for Baking

Shedding Light on the “Eclipse” Narrative: Some Notes on Pragmatism in the Twentieth Century

Shedding Light on the “Eclipse” Narrative: Some Notes on Pragmatism in the Twentieth Century

Doran Ross, Our Mentor and Friend

Doran Ross, Our Mentor and Friend

A Longitudinal Study of Interprofessional Education in Graduate Students From Rehabilitation Sciences

Abstract Date Presented Accepted for AOTA INSPIRE 2021 but unable to be presented due to online event limitations. A longitudinal study evaluated the effects of interprofessional education (IPE) experiences on 71 rehabilitation science graduate students' perceptions of interprofessional collaboration (IPC). Physical therapy, OT, and speech-language pathology students rated their perceptions of IPC and their knowledge of other disciplines' roles across their first year of graduate school. IPE experiences are an important aspect of professional preparation. Primary Author and Speaker: Sarah Elkington Contributing Authors: Connie Summers, Celia Pechak, Patricia Lara, and Francesca Hernandez

On Misencounters and Possibilities

Discussion| December 18 2020 On Misencounters and Possibilities: Reflections on the Mexican Reception of George Kubler’s Theoretical Writings Karen Cordero Reiman Karen Cordero Reiman Karen Cordero Reiman is an art historian, curator, and writer based in Mexico City. She has published on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Mexican art; the relationship between “fine” and “popular” arts in Mexico; Mexican art historiography; body, gender, and sexual identity in Mexican art; and Mexican museological and curatorial discourses. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (2020) 2 (4): 67–71. https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2020.2.4.67 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Karen Cordero Reiman; On Misencounters and Possibilities: Reflections on the Mexican Reception of George Kubler’s Theoretical Writings. Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 18 December 2020; 2 (4): 67–71. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2020.2.4.67 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentLatin American and Latinx Visual Culture Search The work of George Kubler (1912–96) is of key importance for the historiography of Mexican art because, in a discipline that almost always refers to the European context for its methodological roots, he advanced theoretical positions founded in large part on his experience studying the pre-Columbian and viceregal art of Mesoamerica. His questions and conceptual observations are based on that research experience, and the ways in which he elaborated their implications led him to continually interrogate the limits of the art historical discipline and its modes of narration. His theoretical and methodological contributions allowed the aesthetic and art historical recognition of works outside the Western canon, and offered insight into how to describe the changing significance of forms and techniques in different political, cultural, and historical contexts. I had the opportunity to study with Kubler during my first year in graduate school at Yale University in 1980. In the course... You do not currently have access to this content.

The Middle East in World History: Spatial and Temporal Reorderings

In addition to my primary research specialty in Ottoman history, I prepared to teach the history of the Islamic Middle East from my first year in graduate school onward, and I did so throughout my academic career, including preparing graduate students to teach Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern history. My start in world history came later. Around the time I got tenure, my department decided, for comically bad reasons, to create a single world history course on the twentieth century. Having never witnessed creation ex nihilo in a department meeting before, I volunteered for the course. The department's reasons for creating the course were farcical, but I recognized it as a valuable intellectual property. In the existing state of the pedagogical literature, no one had paused to analyze the issues that made the twentieth century into more than the last chapter of a comprehensive world history book. A couple of years later, just as we finished teaching the course for the first time, an editor came along and asked if I had ever thought about writing a textbook. Yes, I had thought about it. Only I had assumed many years would pass before anyone would ask. Such were the origins of my coauthored Twentieth-Century World, having gone through seven editions from 1986 until 2010. It would be an understatement to say that radical revisions were required for each new edition, given not only the lengthening chronology but also the often radical revisions and improvements in the literature. If this presentation sounds more like a memoir than a research paper, the reason is that my dual lives in Middle Eastern and world history interacted in the pedagogical realm, raising issues that redirected my basic research and theoretical inquiries along the way.

When support becomes pressure.

“What is the biggest challenge of graduate school?” an undergrad asked the panel of graduate students at an event I helped organize last summer. “Not letting the support from my community turn into pressure,” one panelist responded. That answer might have surprised some, who probably expected to hear about experiments that didn't work or trudging through literature reviews. But I understood exactly what she meant. The speaker was an African-American woman. I am a member of an underrepresented minority group myself, pursuing a doctoral degree in chemistry, so her comment resonated with me. With my oral candidacy exam approaching, I needed to find a way to keep well-meaning support from adding to my stress. ![Figure][1] ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT NEUBECKER Throughout my education, friends and family have expected me to take advantage of every opportunity I come across because I may not get the same chance again. Members of my community expect me to give outstanding performances everywhere I go because I represent them and our culture. Mentors expect that I will never give up. This has been a great source of motivation, but also of pressure. And when I heard the panelist echo my experience, I understood that I needed to educate my community about how their comments made me feel—and how to keep their support from becoming oppressive. I remembered a conversation with a mentor that illustrated how the right language can make all the difference. At the end of my first year of graduate school, I wrestled with an overwhelming desire to leave the program with a master's degree. I was accustomed to hearing “Don't give up” and “You have to finish”—words that were meant to be motivational. Instead, they made me feel I would be a disappointment if I left, and that I owed it to all the people who had helped me get there to stick with it. After discussing the pros and cons of leaving with my mentor, she offered a response that was completely different from what I expected. “I support any decision you make,” she said. “I will always be proud of you and your achievements.” Hearing this simple, explicit statement of support, I felt every muscle of my body loosen. I hadn't realized that the prospect of disappointing her was causing me so much stress. Perhaps counterintuitively, knowing that she was behind me no matter what helped me decide to stick with my Ph.D. program. My mentor knew the right thing to say, but we can't expect the same from everyone. Now, when people in my community—always with the best intentions—say something that creates pressure and stress and makes me feel bad, I tell them and we talk about it. This was a bit awkward at first. But they want to support me, so I need to give them the tools to do that. Sometimes, friends and family ask me, “How long until you get your degree?” As many grad students will agree, this question is a stress trigger. Now, I respond by telling them that I prefer to be asked “How is your progress in your program?” and I explain why. When I tell my supporters about the challenges I'm experiencing in grad school, they frequently say things like “You'll be OK. Don't stress out,” thinking that this is what I need to hear. I now explain to them that it has the opposite effect of what they intended. It makes me feel I'm doing something wrong or that my feelings are invalid. Instead, I tell them that I prefer to hear, “Do you need someone to talk to? How can I help you through this rough time?” I've started to notice a change. It has required a lot of patience and reminders, but these days, I get fewer stress-inducing questions and comments. All graduate students, but especially those of us who are members of underrepresented groups, carry a weight of expectations from family, friends, and community. Being explicit about our needs and opening up the lines of communication with supporters is a starting point for making the journey less stressful. [1]: pending:yes

Power and Equity in the Academy: Change from Within

Power and Equity in the Academy: Change from Within

Remembering Jeremy Safran, Ph.D.

I met Jeremy Safran during the spring semester my first year of graduate school, when I took an elective course he was teaching on Melanie Klein. I hardly knew anything about psychoanalysis, and it...

Creative Collaborations: Emergent Play in the Preschool Art Studio

During the early summer of 2015, I began my first internship at a museum-based learning preschool in Washington, D.C. Having completed my first year of graduate school in art education, a time in w...

Years/Fears: From Artist to Teacher to Somewhere In-Between

ABSTRACTAs I began my first year of graduate school - admittedly, a shaky start of my own - a group of my former students began to struggle with their transition to high school. Upon hearing this from my friend, colleague, and their current theatre teacher (who I will call Ms. M), I developed a workshop curriculum focused upon health for the artist to facilitate for her company. Both the development of this curriculum and the facilitation of the workshop itself brought on an incredibly cathartic reflection of my own journey towards prioritizing health as an artist. This is the product of that, with the workshop materials I created interspersed for anyone who may wish to recreate a similar experience for their company - said Ms. M afterwards: “This should be taught every year to every high school and college theatre company - it is just SO important.” I hope you feel the same!

CHAINS OF CONNECTION: RETHINKING THE BOURGEOISIE

Since his first year in graduate school, Jerrold Seigel has puzzled over the relationship between modernity and the bourgeoisie. Willing to acknowledge the salience of this class in the making of the modern, he grew increasingly troubled by the failure of every effort to give a clear account of its distinctive historical role. To define the bourgeoisie as simply the group(s) in the middle, “all those who are neither peasants nor workers on the one side, nor aristocrats by birth on the other,” might be empirically accurate, he reasoned, but this provided no analytical insight into the processes of history. The Marxist alternative avoids this vacuity, but only by creating a mythology of the ascendant bourgeoisie—a class that by mere dint of its privileged relation to capital is deemed to be capable of entirely transforming the realms of culture, politics, and the material world. Dissatisfied with these conventional approaches, Seigel introduced a fundamentally new way of thinking in his seminal synthesisModernity and Bourgeois Life, which sought to replace the “traditional nominative formulation [of the bourgeoisie's role] with ones that are more adjectival and historical.” Considering “‘bourgeois’, not in terms of the rise of a class,” he has reconceptualized this term to denote “the emergence and elaboration of a certain ‘form of life’.” It is in connection with this project that Seigel developed the two key concepts that will be considered in this essay, “chains of connection” and “networks of means” (MBL, ix, 6, 25).

Cotton Compress

Cotton Compress* Robert J. Williams (bio) 1949 They marched into the yard like survivors of a massive blizzard. Cotton dust powdered the tops of their denim caps and unkempt heads, despite Vina's repeated directive to "Brush it off, leave it outside!" Their conversations, bounded by boisterous, doubled-over laughs, carried on all the way to the porch and into the orderly line they formed at the kitchen door. They cussed the most incompetent foreman on the planet, teased one fellow about his wife's tar-baby complexion, and longed for the day when "Miss Vina" would forget her ornery widow ways. Then, getting a whiff of the kitchen aromas, they speculated on the source: Rabbit? Squirrel? Vina would never tell. As long as it adequately sustained them until quitting time, what difference did it matter what meat made its way into her stew? Before allowing the men to come inside, Vina carefully raised the morning's concoction upwards to Randolph, her nephew, home for the summer after completing a first year of graduate school up North. "How that taste?" Randolph answered with a tight-lipped wince. He dashed to the sink, spat, and then positioned his mouth beneath a stream of rust-flavored tap water flowing from the faucet, relieving the peppery burn festering on his tongue. Vina tossed a rag over her hunched shoulder, not bothering to explain what Randolph knew: she used bad meat. Damned near rotten. The pepper masks the stink. The men from the cotton compress wouldn't have it any other way, she'd once said. Randolph shook his head. "Now this exemplifies the twisted psychosis of the oppressed Negro. Our perceptions of ourselves remain so perversely distorted, we heartedly believe in our inherent inferiority. We can only conceive ourselves as deserving less than what we truly deserve. So we eat stinking, rotting meat because the bigoted universe ordains it to be." "Nephew, if all those words mean 'them lint-headed niggers eat it because they like it,' then yes, I shall find agreement with you. Now, I thank you for coming to visit your old auntie, but erase all that lecturing from the chalkboard inside your brain and help me serve up these bowls before you up and take off. Those empty bellies outside want to be filled with food, not all your college words." A unique enterprise had been fashioned under the grand shed and in the old warehouses on the other side of Mill Street, directly across the way from Vina's and a row of other [End Page 92] tidy clapboard homes. Fortunately so, most would claim, as it provided employment for dozens of its Turpin Hill neighbors. Hour after hour, day after day—save the day of the Lord—bales of cotton paraded into the back of the building and magically transformed into smaller bales for compact and efficient loading onto waiting boxcars destined for mills, ports, and manufacturers in various points North and South. Cotton compressing was all they did across the street. The economics and presumed profitability fascinated Randolph. How long does it take to train a man to operate the powerful machines that squeeze the cotton as tightly as earthly physics allows? How much time and money do the bosses and owners lose to the idiosyncratic ways of their workers' ilk, fickleness, or prevalence for sickness and lies? How does one account for losing productivity to actual aches and pains lodged deeply into their backs and legs? How many fuel-draining railroad trips are subsequently saved by having those noisy machines squeeze six oversized cubes of cotton into the space of one? What deals secured the land beside the railroad tracks? What clandestine negotiations determined the allowable regulated density of the compressed bales? Engineers, accountants, mathematicians, politicians, financiers—a hundred smart men must have reasoned through a hundred ideas to produce the logistics that created the employment that paid the wages that produced the nickels traded daily for Aunt Vina's forsaken stew. The budding socialists back at the university had no appreciation for cooperative invisible hands steering the wheel of innovation, steadied and encouraged by the rewards of free markets. No time to ponder such...

The identity function

During Erik Remington's first year in graduate school, he was drafted into the Civilian Corps. Unwilling to interrupt his studies in applied physics, he contacted Ravi DeCruz, the young congressman who had spearheaded the legislation leading to the establishment of the Civilian Corps. Erik knew Ravi from college and wanted him to pull some strings.

NMR pioneers reflect on Silicon Valley: a conversation with Martin Packard and Weston Anderson.

NMR pioneers reflect on Silicon Valley: a conversation with Martin Packard and Weston Anderson.