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Graduate student wellbeing has been a longstanding area of concern because of the institutional structures of higher education, which strategically situate graduate students precariously (Drew, 2003; Fleming, 2011; Miller, 2020; Schwaller, 2021). While all campus community members are affected by things like the ongoing pandemic, global violence and genocide, political unrest, climate crises, and economic instability, graduate students are particularly vulnerable because of this structural precarity. Along with developing a scholarly identity, graduate students take on multiple roles as teachers, learners, and laborers. Differing institutional exigencies contribute to vastly different teaching and learning experiences across universities and colleges. With varying needs and expectations from the public, each institution must adapt to serve not only their students, but also stakeholders and funding sources (Thelin, 2019). This means graduate students often must navigate the bureaucracy of their specific institution with little to no background or guidance in traversing these systems or processes—crucially impacting first-generation students and international students. Power dynamics and other institutional barriers may prevent graduate students from reporting on the challenges they are facing. They also may not have many avenues to present suggestions for change and face worsening structural inequities preventing them from putting time or energy into those ideas. Although graduate student labor organizing has a storied history, the disparate conditions across institutions make wide-spread change difficult (Isaac, 2022). Exploring graduate students’ experiences within their programs and related roles to understand the impact on their wellbeing can allow department leaders and writing program administrators to identify successes to be celebrated and challenges to be addressed.
In this article, I explore one approach to assessing graduate student wellbeing through my experiences designing and implementing a pilot survey in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. I reflect on the survey creation which incorporated ethical assessment design principles from student affairs research and a sensemaking process that invited constituents to consider their disciplinary values and expectations and disaggregate wellbeing support expectations on the program, department, college, or university-levels. Further, I share insights from the implementation of the survey that may benefit assessment designers in other contexts. Rather than presenting generalizable data about the wellbeing of graduate students, I seek to share an approach to assessing wellbeing, imploring faculty and writing program administrators to take up similar work with the graduate students in their lives.
In my own experience as a graduate student, I am grateful for where I have access to privilege through my whiteness, status as a U.S. citizen, and place in a relatively well-funded program at an extensive public research university. As a community college graduate and then the graduate of a small liberal arts college, I often had to work multiple jobs to afford my living expenses. This meant when I started my PhD program, I had access to time I never had before and reasonably priced therapy thanks to quality health insurance. I also moved away from people and places that had been traumatic for me. Shortly into my first semester I was diagnosed with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, got connected with university accommodations (which I never had before despite years of struggling), and was able to begin considering how I could take care of myself in meaningful ways. In the past, I worked as a server and bartender in restaurants and breweries, where I felt so palpably the strain on my bodymind (“bodymind” is a term which highlights the inextricable connection between our mental and physical being, see Schalk, 2018) as I walked miles in circles and lifted kegs and faced abuse from customers and supervisors. In that first-year of my PhD, I remember feeling such relief, despite knowing in theory all the ways graduate school could also be taxing on the bodymind. At first, the relief felt really validating: Ah, at last, I am where I am meant to be. Now, as I start my third year and approach dissertator status, I have encountered my own challenges, and I have had time to reflect on the ways my positionality has allowed me to avoid some of the nefarious (and unfortunately common) effects of navigating a PhD. Beyond reading writing studies scholarship on and around trauma and wellbeing, listening to the lived experiences of graduate student peers in my program, at conferences, and in spaces like Writing Program Administration-Graduate Organization (WPA-GO) compelled my interest in the wellbeing of graduate students.
I had the opportunity to explore this interest in a course on writing program administration taught by Morris Young (2023), where I worked with my colleagues Alexandra Chakov, Sydney Goggins, and Nora Harris on a working paper on wellbeing in writing studies for our final course paper. The first task we identified was to create a working definition of wellbeing. Wellbeing is difficult to define because of our varied and nuanced understandings of it—race, culture, class, and other socio-environmental factors can all influence an individual’s understanding and value of wellbeing. So rather than suggesting a comprehensive definition, we suggested that wellbeing may refer to a general state of comfort and access to the necessary resources and support to meet programmatic and institutional expectations in which the fulfillment of basic human needs is compulsory. However, wellbeing must also be defined by the individual based on their own expectations and experiences. Cochran’s (2019) PREMISE framework for wellbeing, which was articulated specifically for use in education spaces, provided an approachable way for us to consider the nuanced factors influencing a person’s ability to be well. PREMISE, an acronym for Positive emotions, Relationships with others, Engagement, Meaningful experiences and goals, Identities (autonomously endorsed), Self-compassion, and Efficacy and Environmental mastery, not only provided a framework for my group to make recommendations about wellbeing in writing studies, but I also realized it may determine whether wellbeing can be measured for assessment purposes. Morris’s class ended, our working paper was submitted, and I headed into my next semester in a course on assessment in higher education with wellbeing heavy on my mind.