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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.

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

References

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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

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  1. Jennifer Pensky
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  2. Christina Richardson
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Correspondence to Jennifer Pensky.

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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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