Creating Community Among Grad Students

Being accepted to your choice of graduate school and program is usually an exciting moment. The chance to dedicate yourself to your passion through intimate, rigorous classes and to reading literature faster than you can binge-watch your favorite show is enthralling. Yet, unfortunately, the excitement often collides with the hidden challenges of graduate education, such as mental health issues, a toxic culture in some institutions and feelings of isolation.

Having a sense of community can help offset those challenges, but most communities among graduate students are limited to specific classes and aren’t sustainable beyond them. Meanwhile, many individual graduate programs and academic departments prioritize academic programming, offering fewer if any events that improve graduate students’ well-being and sense of belonging.

Often, if graduate students want programming for their wellness or sense of belonging on campus, it has to come from fellow students. But organizing a longer-term community is difficult. Graduate students have many responsibilities—taking or teaching classes, conducting research, contributing unpaid labor—often in a space or culture that is foreign to them, all the while struggling with financial insecurity. And although most universities provide resources to graduate students for events and other activities, those resources are frequently less than what’s needed.

Overwhelmed and underfunded, it is to no surprise that many students aren’t interested in taking on a leadership role to help create and maintain a sense of community. Yet it takes student leadership to transform a student body into a community. And in our many communications with other grad students, we’ve found that they definitely want more of a sense of community and camaraderie.

A healthy partnership between the university and its graduate student organizations is key to successfully creating a sense of community for students. Based on our own experiences as student organizers, we would like to provide some recommendations to both institutions and grad students on how to approach community-building efforts.

Advice for Institutions

Intentional events for students are a good way to build and maintain communities, but it takes an organized and detailed planning process to create a good event and ensure momentum for future ones. That can be a lot for grad student organizations to handle, so institutions should offer more training and support—including leadership development, access to space and funding for activities.

Leadership development. Student leaders should receive adequate training and professional development. Marketing, event planning, communications, developing a culture of engagement—these are all skills that grad students don’t have equally and could all benefit from learning. A series of workshop on internal communication, conflict management, work-life balance and advocacy would also be helpful for the success of a student-run effort to build a community organization.

Depending on the structure of the graduate school and the connections between different departments, one way to create and maintain community among grad students may be to keep it small. A larger institution could help train department-based units about how to enhance grad students’ sense of community within their disciplines and keep an updated list of all organizations open to graduate students.

Access to space. Graduate students should have a reliable and easy access to spaces on the campus to study, work on their research, host writing camps, practice interviews, network or just relax between classes. It is hard to feel a sense of belonging when there isn’t a place you can comfortably occupy.

Funding. More direct financial support from the institution or departments for programming for grad students—as well as compensation for student leaders who step up—is also greatly needed. When institutions provide such resources, it goes a long way toward helping students feel appreciated and valued. Also, student leaders cannot sustain themselves with just the experience and network they might develop from their role. They simply can’t focus on the future if the now is neglected.

Advice for Student Leaders

If you are a student leader hoping to create community among grad students, we suggest you aim to provide the following.

Connections, options and inclusion. No one time will be perfect for everyone, but you should be aware of class schedules and other conflicts as much as you can when planning your events. Connect with other graduate student organizations to know when they’re planning their events to occur so you aren’t competing for attendees. In addition, consider offering multiple sessions of the same event to give people options.

You should also have at least a rough idea at the beginning of the semester about what types of events you want to host, what events should be offered on different days to capture the most attendees and what can be done once or should be repeated or rotated with other events.

We also recommend sending out a survey at the beginning of the semester or academic year to all graduate students—from those in their first year to the most seasoned—to help you identify students’ interests and what would be most helpful and useful to them. Surveying students will also help you create an inclusive culture early on by providing information about the various backgrounds of students and their particular needs. The outreach should be intentional and include graduate students from different backgrounds who have different focuses and are seeking different degrees.

Balanced event types. Plan a variety of programs. Students may need professional development help, such as creating CVs, polishing up interviewing skills, or learning how to network at a conference. They may also need a safe space from such pressures. Create boundaries and allow no job talk at some social events to help maintain work-life balance and avoid burnout.

Incentives and encouragements. As an organizer, you know your event is exciting and people should attend. But that might not be clear to your potential participants, who often need to be encouraged to come to programs created for them. Catering food, providing local restaurant gift cards as giveaways or distributing silly and fun items (that are not offensive or insensitive) can help increase interest and involvement, especially during a financially difficult time.

Another way to draw grad students can be to explain the benefits of community engagement to them early on. Remind them that while academic development opportunities are vital, they should not let them completely overshadow the importance of relationships with others. Also, encourage more students to help with the planning process by highlighting how much it can be a leadership-development opportunity. Explain that it will be a chance for them to develop transferable skills that they will need in most, if not all, occupations. Holding yourself and your peers accountable for managing conflict and communicating to a diverse audience—these are skills you can learn and practice by being in a student leadership position.

Discouragement to encouragement. You’ll experience times when you’re excited about your event and have done all you can but the turnout isn’t as good as expected. It will be discouraging, but it’s helpful to remember the limitations we as students must work within. At our universities, we must compete for spaces, funding and other resources, which all take time and energy.

And while it can perhaps be easy to come up with an idea for an event, making that event successful and well attended is a different story. It takes an organized and detailed planning process, marketing, content development, intentional assessment, a lot of luck and more to have a good event and create momentum for future ones.

If you feel an event misses the mark, remember that leadership is more than just a title; it is also the willingness to learn and listen. Perfection is a hoax, so view each event and interaction as a lesson for improvement. It is good to reflect, and it is healthy to move on and apply what you’ve learned in the future.

Communicate and Collaborate

Perhaps the most important advice we want to share is that students and universities need to collaborate. Creating community and a sense of belonging is a huge task that should not simply fall solely on graduate student leaders’ or staff members’ shoulders. We encourage both parties to take the initiative to start conversations with each other about the roles they can and should play. Our hope is that such communication and collaboration will lead to a greater focus on wellness and retention for graduate students, as opposed to just admission and enrollment.