STEM doctoral student agency regarding funding

ABSTRACT

This study explores STEM doctoral student agency with respect to funding as it relates to degree completion and career preparation. We interviewed 39 graduate students in chemistry, physics, and engineering at two large, public, research-intensive institutions in the USA. Although STEM doctoral students have a high expectation of full funding, instability of funding and unavailability of desired funding types limit the agency of some students. When several types of funding are available, advisors can encourage student agency in pursuing opportunities to gain skills or networking connections through teaching assistantships, research assistantships, or internships. However, students were not able to articulate specific ways that assistantships prepared them for nonacademic positions, which is an important direction for future work.

KEYWORDS:

• Assistantship
• funding
• engineering
• science
• graduate students

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation Division of Graduate Education under Grant Numbers DGE-1535462/1535226. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Additionally, we thank research team member Timothy Kinoshita who was instrumental to the project throughout data collection as well as providing feedback on framing this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Abbreviations are fully described in Methods and Table 1. Briefly: Male or Female, International or Domestic—Institution A or B, discipline.

2 Graduate Assistant, another type of employment that is not research-focused.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Division of Graduate Education: [Grant Number 1535226,1535462].