The Michigan Doctoral Experience Study (MDES) is a longitudinal study of Rackham PhD students that examines the process of academic socialization and scholarly development. The MDES survey asks students about their motivations, expectations, goals, experiences, and levels of well-being, among other topics. PhD students take the MDES survey shortly after they enter their programs and then each year of their program thereafter, which allows researchers to examine how students change over the trajectory of graduate study. MDES is also cohort-based, expanding to include new cohorts of PhD students each year. Now in its ninth year, the study contains data on over 6,500 students, making it a rich source of information on graduate student well-being over the past decade.
This session will provide an overview of MDES’s findings on students’ mental and physical health, stress, intention to quit, and other factors related to well-being. By sharing recent research, we will examine how these factors change over time, across cohorts, and among students from different backgrounds. We will also share our working model of individual, program, and societal factors that influence students’ mental health, noting that relationships between these factors are complex and not easy to modify with quick interventions. We conclude by offering insights from the MDES data about conditions that are particularly supportive of graduate student well-being.
