Graduate students are the largest-growing group at East Tennessee State University. While it is easy to assume that graduates have mastered the basics of searching and conducting research, this assumption is largely unfounded. Whether they did learn these skills as undergraduates or not, graduates are rarely prepared for the project management challenge of undertaking the biggest research assignment of their lives. Graduate students often have additional stressors not faced by undergraduates: established careers, families, and greater financial responsibilities. Conceived during Summer 2015 and rolled out as an ongoing series in Fall 2015, the Graduate Student Workshops offered by the Sherrod Library provide instruction in the following areas: scholarly research, papers, and publishing; comprehensive project management; academic searching; APA style; citation management; and establishing a professional identity. As the program coordinator, the Graduate Services Librarian will discuss the origination of the program, from its inception in ETSU’s Graduate Thesis and Dissertation Boot Camp to its growth as a full-fledged series. Creating new relationships, leveraging partnerships with other faculty and departments, and organizing and marketing these services are critical to program success. Scheduling, logistics, costs, and assessment will also be discussed. After the program and discussion, attendees should be able to: recognize the significant function librarians can provide to graduate student research support convey the value of formal, targeted intervention to graduate students and campus administrators create offerings to support their own graduate students

There is NO more traditional library function for instruction librarians than teaching information literacy. Without sacrificing expected librarian services such as demonstrating searching and citation management, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education allows us to orient students with a high-level, integrated view of how the seemingly disparate pieces and requirements of graduate research form an integrated whole.

Librarians at East Tennessee State University conducted a voluntary focus group of international students to better understand the academic needs of the growing population. Students participated in a full-day discussion concerning academic staples such as planning and studying, finding and reading, and writing and citing. After a long exchange on communication and cultural differences, the students endorsed a new workshop on academic writing proposed by the librarians. This workshop will become part of the existing sequence of nine graduate-level research support offerings given by the Library for graduate students and faculty.

All too frequently, instruction librarians’ only opportunity to teach students distills down to the fifty-minute, one-shot, make-or-break experience. We disseminate the essential information as requested—how to use the library, how to search the databases, and so on—with little time to explain why all the pieces fit together and why they are important. Worse, well-intentioned librarians often strive to cover as much as possible in these sessions, oversaturating and frustrating their student audience. Even in settings of brief duration with no follow-up, another approach is possible. Rather than attempting to demonstrate everything at once, we can interject effective, real-life motivational tactics into the session by highlighting the underlying purpose of the process demonstrated. In other words, we can focus not simply on “what” or “how” but on “why.” Providing this context and structure not only grounds students, it clarifies and demystifies the process. Understanding that purpose and method are as important as data better empowers students with strategies to pursue their own needs independently. This chapter focuses on graduate students, particularly those in doctoral programs, but with a little creative thinking, these strategies could also be adapted for application with undergraduate learners.

The question of the development and content of personal career goals has received little attention and relatively little is known about the factors influencing career goals and when and how career goal setting occurs. Drawing from Ashforth’s (2001) model of role transitions, I propose that professional identification is an important precursor to the development of career goals. The primary research objectives of this dissertation are to explore how identity motives drawn from experiences in graduate school relate to professional identification and how professional identification relates to both short- and long-term career goals for graduate students. I investigated my conceptual model and research hypotheses using a mixed-methods design. The stage 1 qualitative analysis was used to (1) identify measures corresponding to Ashforth’s (2001) four psychological motives (i.e., identity, control, meaning, and belonging) as antecedents of identification and (2) representative measures of career goals for graduate students. Forty-eight graduate students responded to open-ended questions about graduate school experiences, challenges, and career goals. Content analysis revealed measureable constructs for graduate students that align with Ashforth’s control and belonging motives; graduate students elicited support from advisors (i.e., career and psychosocial mentoring), peers (i.e., peer support), and colleagues (i.e., networking) to provide a framework for identification with their new professional roles. In terms of outcome goal variables, graduate students’ goals reflected two major content themes: extrinsic needs and status attainment. The responses from the Stage 1 qualitative survey along with social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) and the goal setting literature served as the basis for the development of the Stage 2 quantitative survey assessing both short-term and long-term career goals. Based on a sample of 312 (short-term career goal model) and 243 (long-term career goal model) graduate students from 28 different universities in fields across both hard and social sciences, results show that one individual characteristic (need for identification) and actions of faculty advisors (psychosocial mentoring) are positively related to professional identification. Professional identification was related to goals in two main ways. First, higher professional identification positively related to short-term career goals which were high quality – that is, the goals were specific, difficult, and graduate students were committed to achieving them. Second, professional identification was positively related to both short-and long-term extrinsic goals, suggesting that graduate students who have internalized the goals and objectives of the profession see that a way to solidify their professional standing is to pursue a position that presents opportunities for high wages and external rewards. Overall, the research findings have implications for theory related to identification motives and identification in role transition processes. The study also contributes to the literature on careers and goal setting, especially as it relates to professional workers. From a practical perspective, faculty advisors should emphasize positive psychosocial mentoring experiences such as counseling and friendship to create a sense of professional identity for students, and professional associations and faculty should consider that identification with a profession is primarily related to career goals associated with high financial success.

Nisbet's theory of alienation entails three propositions: 1) alienation is a unidimensional phenomenon; 2) alienation is a generalized phenomenon; and 3) power relations foster loss of community which engenders alienation. All three propositions were tested on a population of graduate students at a university in the Pacific Northwest.

Researchers and practitioners have increasingly focused on institutional responses to campus gender-based violence/harassment, yet they have paid far less attention to graduate student experiences than to undergraduate student experiences. Graduate students operate in a different context from undergraduates, and therefore specific knowledge of gender-based violence/harassment in the lives of graduate students is needed. The purpose of this exploratory, nonexperimental study was to better understand the prevalence of adult gender-based violence/harassment and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) among graduate students, as well as to understand the relationship between those experiences and participants’ mental health and academic functioning. The study’s theoretical framework combined critical adult learning theories with cognitive perspectives on adult learning, including the neurobiology of trauma. Data used in the current study were originally collected as part of an institutional campus climate survey on gender-based violence; responses from n = 684 of the randomly selected participants were used in the current study’s analyses. Participants commonly reported both adult gender-based violence/harassment experiences and ACEs. The results of two OLS regressions indicated that experiencing more types of adult gender-based violence/harassment or more types of ACEs was associated with higher levels of negative affect and lower levels of mindfulness. Among participants who experienced gender-based violence/harassment in graduate school, independent samples t-tests showed that individuals who reported at least occasional academic functioning difficulties had lower levels of mindfulness and higher levels of negative affect than those who did not experience difficulties. Overall, the findings suggest the need for trauma-informed policies and practices within graduate education and higher education in general.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to fill an existing gap in research on bereavement and graduate students. The study explored how bereavement and grief affect a person physically, mentally, and cognitively. Prior studies have addressed bereavement in undergraduate college students, but little research has focused on online graduate students and bereavement. This study fills that gap in the literature allowing university personnel and the public access to an understanding as to how online graduate students' bereavement affects their academic performance and how they perceive their university supports them during their time of bereavement. This exploration used a case study design and Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory as its theoretical foundation. Open-ended interview data were collected from 10 formerly bereaved graduate students in face to face structured interviews. Interviews were transcribed and categorized using a 7-step process to organize all relevant statements. The results revealed that bereaving graduate students felt isolated, experienced difficulty focusing, and required extensions for completing their coursework. Participants concluded it was important for bereaving students to ask for help during bereavement. This study provides an understanding of the experience of being a bereaved online graduate student, and further provides information to assist university personnel in how to serve bereaved graduate students. This information may lead to enhanced programs or services meeting the needs of graduate students, including promotion of staff training related to the unique needs of bereaved graduate students.

Enrollment in master level programs has been increasing nationwide, particularly in online programs which tend to enroll older and more ethnically diverse students who are likely to be balancing work, finances, and family responsibilities with their educational pursuits. The challenges related to this balance has resulted in higher attrition rates and lower completion rates. In this quantitative study, the relationship between employer support and first-year retention for master's students enrolled in online programs at a for-profit university was examined. Bean and Metzner's model of nontraditional student attrition was used as the theoretical foundation. Archival data from the online institution were examined to determine the extent that 1st year retention is predicted by employer support when controlling for demographics, student background, external factors, integration/socialization, and intent to graduate. Findings from the logistic regression analysis showed 4 variables that significantly predict 1st year retention, employer support, household income, overall satisfaction, and importance of graduating from the institution. Students who received employer support were almost 2 times more likely to be retained at 1-year. Positive social change can result from having educational institutions encourage students to seek employee educational benefits. Having students seek these employer benefits may lead to higher graduation rates, higher pay, and job satisfaction for employees.

That graduate study is detrimental to marriages has received empirical support. This study utilized systems theory to examine and help explain the dissolution process of graduate student marriages. Specifically, it examined the impact of marital structure on perceptions of marital quality. Drawing primarily from Scheinkman's (1988) qualitative study, spouses in asymmetrical marriages (i.e., marriages where only one spouse is in graduate school), as opposed to symmetrical marriages (i.e., marriages where both spouses are in graduate school), were hypothesized to report (a) less satisfaction with the division of household labor, (b) lower perceptions of equity, and (c) less satisfaction with emotional intimacy. These, in turn, were hypothesized to lower perceptions of marital quality. Participants from a list of master's and doctoral-level students at a west coast university in the United States were randomly selected and contacted by phone. Only married students and their partners were solicited for participation. The final sample consisted of 121 married individuals (60 husband-wife pairs, 1 female) who responded to a mailed questionnaire. Of these 121 respondents, 85 were involved in asymmetrical arrangements and 36 in symmetrical arrangements. Contrary to expectations, asymmetry did not indirectly (and negatively) affect marital quality through satisfaction with the division of household labor and perception of equity. There was, however, some evidence that asymmetry negatively influenced marital quality by lowering spouses' satisfaction with emotional intimacy. This latter finding was considered to be meaningfully significant because satisfaction with emotional intimacy was by far the strongest predictor of marital quality. The findings are discussed primarily in terms of the education level of each spouse. Reconceptualizing asymmetry as an educational or power differential, or even more generally as a difference in emotional experiences, is recommended. In other words, it is not the number of spouses in school per se that matters; it is the understanding and emotional connectedness between them. / Graduation date: 1997