Dartmouth Graduate Studies recently partnered with Institutional Research, to conduct an annual survey of PhD students.  The survey was open to all 533 doctoral students at Dartmouth, including those in the Arts & Science, Medical School and Thayer School.

The survey collected data from 72% of the total current PhD students at Dartmouth.  Respondents were largely continuing graduate students, with first-year graduate students representing 20% of total survey respondents.

“The survey gives us a better understanding of doctoral students’ experiences at Dartmouth, and is necessary part of evaluating how our programs are doing in academic skills training” says Kerry Landers, Assistant Dean of Graduate Student Affairs.

Overall, graduate students deemed their academic experience at Dartmouth to be extremely positive.  Over 95% of students surveyed ranked faculty interactions as ‘good or excellent’ and over 85% of students rated the quality of advising to be similarly strong.  Additionally, over 90% of students surveyed indicated that they had gained additional knowledge through their study at Dartmouth, and over 92% ranked the quality of their fellow students as ‘very high’.

“The annual survey better enables us to understand the areas in which we are succeeding, and where there is room to improve,” says Brian Pogue, Dean of Graduate Studies.  “For example, we learned that travel to conferences for some students is perhaps not as high as we might like it to be.  So, related to this, the Graduate Studies office doubled the funding available to PhD students, allowing them up to $1000 for one-time travel to present at a scientific conference if they need the extra funding to make the trip.  We hope to study the data in different ways to determine if additional improvements can be found for the PhD student experience.”

The Graduate Studies Office would like to thank Lynn Foster Johnson and the rest of the Office of Institutional Research for their work in collecting and analyzing the survey data.

As a participation incentive, all PhD students who completed the survey were entered into a raffle for a $50 gift card to Canoe Club. The following students were randomly selected as the winners:

Joshua Brody
Paige Rinker
Lyubomir Zagorchev
Kristen Mascall
Samantha Reynolds
John Hammond
Neil Epstein
Gregory Feiden
Shaohan Hu
Yang Gao

Congratulations to all the winners!

The survey will be completed annually as part of the Graduate Studies function to work with students and faculty to assess graduate learning outcomes.