Empowering First-Year Computer Science Ph.D. Students to Create a Culture that Values Community and Mental HealthIn-PersonGlobal
Doctoral programs often have high rates of depression, anxiety, isolation, and imposter phenomenon. Consequently, graduating students may feel inadequately prepared for research-focused careers, contributing to an attrition of talent. Prior work identifies an important contributing factor to maladjustment: that, even with prior exposure to research, entering Ph.D. students often have problematically idealized views of science. These preconceptions can become obstacles for students in their own professional growth. Unfortunately, existing curricular and extracurricular programming in many doctoral programs do not include mechanisms to systematically address students’ misconceptions of their profession. In this work, we describe a new initiative at our institution that aims to address Ph.D. mental health via a mandatory seminar for entering doctoral students. The seminar is designed to build professional resilience in students by (1) increasing self-regulatory competence, and (2) teaching students to proactively examine academic cultural values, and to participate in shaping them. Our evaluation indicates that students improved in both areas after completing the seminar.
Fri 17 MarDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
10:45 - 12:00 | |||
10:45 25mPaper | An Undergraduate Consortium for Addressing the Leaky Pipeline to Computing ResearchMSIIn-Person Papers DOI | ||
11:10 25mPaper | Empowering First-Year Computer Science Ph.D. Students to Create a Culture that Values Community and Mental HealthIn-PersonGlobal Papers DOI | ||
11:35 25mPaper | Research Experience for Graduate Students (REGS): The Evolution of Computing Education Projects and Creation of a Virtual CommunityIn-Person Papers Stephanie Lunn Florida International University, Maíra Marques Samary , Alan Peterfreund SageFox Consulting Group DOI |