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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 student 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, identifying excessive workloads, under pay, difficult advisor relationships, and an unhealthy glorification of "grind culture". However, less is known about how students navigate and respond to this culture. In this work, we performed a mixed method study triangulating survey and structured interview data collected through an extracurricular student project. We investigated three key aspects of graduate school, particularly experiences with 1) work-life-balance, 2) imposter syndrome, and 3) burnout. To develop the survey and interview instruments, we developed a pool of memes and graduate student oriented advice columns then used thematic analysis to identify 9 thematic questions about the graduate student experience. For this work, the data set was abbreviated to consider only the 3 most salient topics. We found that students generally disagreed with the negative themes identified 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 with 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper examines the curricular messages perceived by students about what practices are valued and central to engineering work. Emphasis on certain practices, and de-emphasis on others, can impact if students see themselves as engineers and their interests in engineering. In this study, we compared the experiences of two 3rd-year Industrial Engineering students and two 3rd-year Mechanical Engineering students through semi-structured interviews. We analyzed these data guided by Holland and colleagues' figured worlds framework to build an understanding of the engineering practices and skills students perceived as important in their courses, what values, activities, and interests were encouraged and discouraged by their instructors and peers, and how these practices and skills aligned or misaligned with student career and engineering interests. Our findings showed that teamwork, problem-solving, technical communication, and using foundational technical knowledge were perceived by students as emphasized most in their classes. Students discussed how these practices and skills built the foundation to do their engineering work but were at times dissatisfied with the lack of social considerations around stakeholders, sustainability, and contextual aspects of their work. Students further described career interests to solve complex, societal issues. This paper has implications for incorporating sociotechnical practices and broader careers interest into engineering curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the mental health of science, engineering, and mathematics (SEM) graduate students using quantitative analysis on the survey data provided by the Healthy Minds Network (HMN): Research on Adolescent and Young Adult Mental Health group, coined the Healthy Minds Study (HMS). The aim of this study is to answer the following research question: How does the presence of (a) self-sufficiency, (b) sense of belonging, and/or (c) social self-efficacy impact an SEM graduate student's mental health? Attention to the mental health of students in higher education has grown in recent years. Prior work has shown that several factors can influence an individuals' mental health, including, but not limited to, a students' demographics, social factors, available resources, values, motivation, and academic discipline. The purpose of this study is to focus specifically on how social aspects can influence graduate students' mental health, or mental and emotional well-being. Therefore, this paper will pull on past work that has found several factors that have improved students' mental health in social contexts. The current literature shows trends between a student's need for both independence and ownership of their work while having some level of personal support. There have been multiple concepts used to explore this, including self-sufficiency, sense of belonging, and social self-efficacy. Social selfefficacy is defined as one's confidence to employ social skills to initiate social contact and develop new friendships, whereas self-sufficiency refers to one's ability to independently complete their day-to-day tasks. How connected one feels to their communities is represented by sense of belonging. This study will determine how, if at all, these concepts impact a student's mental health, measured by proxy through depression and suicidal ideation. The focus of this paper is specific to the graduate student population as the experiences and needs of students in graduate programs are different from those in associates or baccalaureate programs. Although current literature has been showing an increase in work surrounding mental health for students in higher education, there seems to be a lack of research specific to SEM graduate students' mental health. To do so, this paper presents the quantitative data analysis that was performed using data collected from 2007-2013 by the HMN. Of the 89,486 student responses from this timeframe, roughly 2,439 students responded as United States graduate students in the natural sciences, mathematics, and engineering, with 1,201 responses being complete. Using these 1,201 responses, descriptive and bi-variant statistics were performed and reported with regards to the research question. The anticipated results included how, if at all, the three concepts of self-sufficiency, sense of belonging, and social self-efficacy vary among different graduate student demographics, and if these demographics have an impact on the prevalence of mental health problems. The hope is that SEM graduate students, faculty, and staff can use these results to influence individual and programmatic changes to improve SEM graduate student mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]