This survey, which will run until April 24, is designed to better understand the current graduate student experience

How do you feel about your graduate student experience?

That’s the question that the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Graduate Student Survey, known as the gradSERU Survey, is seeking to understand when it launches next week.

The survey, which runs March 13 to April 24, is designed to examine students' experiences across the entire spectrum of their graduate career: academic, research, teaching, professional development, well-being and sense of community. A unique survey URL will be distributed over email to almost all non-professional graduate students—and those who respond will be automatically entered into a drawing with a chance to win one of ten $100 Amazon gift cards.

Information gleaned from the previous gradSERU survey, administered in spring 2021, helped facilitate stipend increases for graduate students, an expansion of embedded counselors in all schools and colleges across the university, and the hiring of a diversity, equity and inclusion faculty director within the Graduate School. Results from the survey also assisted in informing some of the Graduate School’s strategic plan goals.

The Graduate School is now interested in what has changed—and what has not—in the last two years. 

“Collecting this wide range of information from our graduate students helps us get a sense of how they are doing in a variety of different circumstances,” said Scott Adler, dean of the Graduate School. “Are we now doing better or worse? How do we compare to our peer institutions? Those are the types of questions that we look to answer with this survey.”

A link to the survey will be emailed on March 13 to graduate students within participating programs. In addition to the core questions that will be compared to other SERU institutions within the consortium, the survey will also include a small number of questions that are specific to CU Boulder graduate students and programs.

Through its administration every other year, the gradSERU survey provides an ongoing way to track changes and improvements in academic programs and the utility of various support services for the Graduate School. Individual graduate programs can also use the results of the survey to better understand their own student satisfaction in a wide range of categories.

“We learned quite a bit of valuable information from the survey in 2021 and we expect to learn even more as we track these items over time,” Adler added. “We want to know the accomplishments and triumphs, as well as the challenges and obstacles, that our graduate students are experiencing.”