Graduate Students

Graduate student participation is required in the Grand Research Challenge, and research proposals must include plans for structuring genuinely collaborative partnerships and mentoring for graduate students into all aspects of the project’s work.

Ways to Collaborate

Include graduate students as equal partners at every step of the planning and execution process—including as co-authors, co-presenters, and/or co-curators.
Design roles for graduate students from the start in proposal planning, linking those roles to the research-based problem, as a collaborative partner project.
Prioritize students with underrepresented minority backgrounds and think strategically about designing teamwork so inclusivity is at work in all aspects of the project.
Consider what content knowledge, expertise and skills graduate students have that can inform the project design; these include research specialty, community engagement experience, and/or digital humanities capabilities.
Develop plans for professional development (e.g., training opportunities: anti-racism workshops; grant writing; project management) and mentoring (e.g., by a team member or project participant) for them. Share opportunities with them as those unfold.
Talk with graduate students about how project work aligns with their job market planning and connect them to relevant campus resources.
Be mindful of how changes to the project timeline or parameters may impact graduate students’ timelines and progress to degree completion; work to mitigate that impact

Things to Avoid

Do not limit their participation to tasks with no intellectual or substantive links to project work.
Do not make assumptions about knowledge, aptitude, expertise, or interests based on skin color, gender, sexual orientation, or self-presentation.
Do not include students of underrepresented or marginalized backgrounds, as a means to gain access to particular communities, materials, or areas of knowledge.
Do not assign responsibilities for which graduate students have no context or training (e.g., liaising with partners or participants).
Do not reinforce the academic hierarchy of faculty-graduate student in the classroom, the lab, or the dissertation process; be mindful of power imbalances in decision-making processes and explicitly invite and allow for equal participation in those processes.