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Disrupt and demystify the unwritten rules of graduate school

Nature Geoscience volume 14, pages 538–539 (2021)Cite this article

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The hidden curriculum of academia in North America includes social and cultural norms that typically align with those of the white middle class1. This means that the hidden curriculum can be even less visible, and ultimately inhospitable, hostile and exclusionary, for those with intersecting and marginalized identities with regard to, for example, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. These unwritten rules and expectations contribute to the geosciences being one of the least diverse and inclusive disciplines within science, technology, engineering and mathematics2.

Importantly, graduate students should not have to conform to hidden academic norms to succeed. We need to both demystify and disrupt the hidden curriculum; to bring visibility to the skills that graduate students need for a successful career in academia while confronting our community’s structural inequities. We believe that everyone has an individual responsibility to become part of the anti-racism movement3 and to change the existing academic culture and structure at every level. Here we highlight examples of gaps within our formal training and suggest some actions to address key elements of the hidden curriculum.

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Fig. 1: Graduate school curriculum viewed as an iceberg.

References

  1. Smith, B. Mentoring At-Risk Students through the Hidden Curriculum of Higher Education (Lexington Books, 2013).

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Acknowledgements

We thank A. Donaldson and C. Murphy, who helped us develop these discussions into a graduate-level discussion-based course that was offered for the first time in the autumn of 2020. The course focused on sharing experiences and developing strategies to navigate several unwritten rules of the hidden curriculum; course materials and metrics can be found at https://go.nature.com/3xSOCdH. We also thank L. Scholz, T. Pico and J. Green for helpful feedback on earlier versions of this Correspondence. M.Z. was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (EAR-2046957).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    Jennifer Pensky, Christina Richardson, Araceli Serrano, Adam N. Price & Margaret Zimmer

  2. Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Galen Gorski

Authors
  1. Jennifer Pensky
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  2. Christina Richardson
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  3. Araceli Serrano
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Correspondence to Jennifer Pensky.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Pensky, J., Richardson, C., Serrano, A. et al. Disrupt and demystify the unwritten rules of graduate school. Nat. Geosci. 14, 538–539 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00799-w

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