WIP: Implementing the Rising Doctoral Institute, a Case Study in an R1 University of the US Northeast

The purpose of this Work-in-progress, research-to-practice paper is to illustrate the implementation of the Rising Doctoral Institute (RDI) at an R1 university in the Northeast of the US. The RDI is a research-based NSF-funded intervention directed at first-year doctoral students in engineering programs that aims to address common student struggles such as doctoral program management, fostering advising relationships, day-to-day management activities, navigating the culture of graduate school, and finding their place in the research community. The RDI curriculum was built leveraging research findings from a large dataset from a different intervention project aimed at later-stage graduate students. Throughout this process, we studied the experiences of roughly 125 underrepresented racial and ethnic minority (URM) doctoral students and identified five themes relating to the common struggles they face throughout their Ph.D. One of the objectives of the RDI project is to disseminate our intervention to approximately 25 institutions. Over the past two years, leaders from institutions that were part of our pilot dissemination were trained in our RDI curriculum and implemented a version of the RDI in their schools. This paper describes the implementation in one of those institutions that built and adapted two different versions of the RDI based on their students' needs and the logistical constraints of their institution. Based on a thematic analysis of interviews conducted with the collaborating institutional leaders (CILs), our study showed three initial findings: 1) Both RDI models allow a supporting community to navigate the challenges in graduate school; 2) The biggest challenge for each local RDI model is logistical; and 3) The support offered to URM graduate students motivates CILs to continue implementing the local RDI.