Located in the United States
Most respondents were located in the United States. The remaining 7% were located in Canada.
- Project type
- Graduate student survey
- Responses
- 57 psychology graduate students
- Focus
- Teaching experiences, professional awareness, and career support
- My role
- Data analysis and interpretation
01 · Why this interested me
Graduate students can spend years preparing to teach without necessarily knowing what teaching resources are available to them.
Graduate training tends to make research opportunities fairly visible. Students hear about laboratories, conferences, publications, grants, and research mentorship because those activities are built into many graduate programs.
Teaching development can feel less obvious. A graduate student may be teaching a course, working as a teaching assistant, or considering a teaching-focused career while knowing relatively little about the organizations, conferences, funding, and professional communities built around teaching.
That was one reason I found this survey interesting. Instead of assuming that students knew where those resources were, the survey gave us a chance to ask what students had actually heard about and how supported they felt.
From my perspective, this makes the project partly a question about information access. An opportunity can exist and still have very little practical value to someone who never learns about it.
02 · Who responded
A small snapshot of psychology graduate students
The survey received 57 responses. Most respondents were located in the United States, with a smaller group located in Canada. Most were enrolled in PhD programs, while others reported being in joint master's and PhD programs, master's programs, or PsyD programs.
Enrolled in PhD programs
Most respondents identified their current program as a PhD program. Other respondents were enrolled in joint master's and PhD, master's, or PsyD programs.
The survey did not require respondents to provide detailed demographic information. However, 46% voluntarily shared information about aspects of their identity.
Among those responses were students who identified as BIPOC, first-generation, LGBTQIA+, low-income, disabled or neurodivergent, or nontraditional age students. Some respondents described more than one identity.
I think this information is useful for understanding who was represented in the responses, but I would not treat it as a demographic profile of psychology graduate students more generally. Participation was voluntary, and the sample was small.
03 · What stood out to me
Many respondents had not heard about major teaching resources.
The awareness results were probably the part of the survey that caught my attention most. They made me think about the difference between creating a professional opportunity and actually getting that opportunity in front of the people who might use it.
Had not previously heard of STP
More than half of respondents indicated that they had not heard about the Society for the Teaching of Psychology before participating in the survey.
Had not known about ACT
A large majority reported that they had not previously known about the Annual Conference on Teaching.
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My takeaway
What struck me was not simply that some students did not know about these resources. It was how easy that information gap could be to miss.
From the perspective of an organization or department, a conference, travel award, teaching resource, or professional community may already be available. From the perspective of a student who has never heard about it, however, that opportunity effectively does not exist yet.
It made me think about access as partly a communication problem. Sometimes improving support may not require creating something completely new. It may begin with asking whether existing resources are reaching students through the people and channels they actually pay attention to.
04 · Support for teaching careers
Respondents reported stronger support from advisors than from departments.
The survey also asked students how supported they felt when considering a teaching-focused career after graduate school.
Fifty-nine percent indicated that they felt very supported by their advisor. In comparison, 30% indicated that they felt very supported by their department.
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What I noticed in the open-ended responses
The percentages gave us a useful overall picture, but these comments added something the numbers could not. Students did not describe departmental support in a single way. Some felt actively encouraged to develop as teachers, while others described teaching as something that received little attention or felt secondary to research.
What stood out to me is that support may involve more than whether a department is generally positive about teaching. Students also seemed to notice whether teaching careers were openly discussed, whether training was available, and whether they felt comfortable expressing an interest in a career outside a research-focused path.
I would still take these comments with some caution. Open-ended responses reflect individual experiences, and a few comments cannot tell us how common each experience is. I see them as useful examples that help put some human context around the survey percentages and point toward questions worth studying more systematically.
05 · My role
Turning survey responses into a clearer picture
My contribution to this project was primarily on the data analysis side. I summarized students’ awareness of STP and ACT, and organized open-ended responses into broader themes. I worked with Josh Lovett to identify, analyze, and communicate data results into more applied findings.
- Reviewed the survey response data and helped organize information for descriptive analysis.
- Co-analyzed patterns related to respondents' graduate programs, awareness of teaching resources, and perceived professional support.
- Helped identify quantitative patterns that could be communicated in the public GSTA survey synopsis.
- Considered how to summarize the findings without treating a small voluntary sample as representative of all psychology graduate students.
The original survey was created by Lauren Girouard-Hallam. Data analysis was conducted by Josh Lovett and me. The published synopsis was written by Alexa Sacchi. The published graphics were created using Canva.
06 · Questions the findings raised for me
What would I want to understand next?
The survey identifies patterns, but it does not tell us exactly what produced them. For me, that is where the more interesting follow-up questions begin.
Where do students actually get information?
I would want to know which channels students actually notice. Is information more likely to reach them through advisors, department emails, other graduate students, orientation, teaching centers, social media, or professional organizations?
When does the information become useful?
A first year graduate student may need something different from a student preparing to teach independently or entering the job market. Timing may matter as much as whether the information was technically available.
How much does support depend on the advisor?
I would be interested in whether students receive similar career information across a department or whether access depends heavily on the interests and knowledge of an individual mentor.
Does awareness turn into participation?
Knowing that a conference or resource exists is only one step. A useful follow-up would examine whether students use those resources, what prevents participation, and which resources they actually find valuable.
07 · What I took from the project
Simple descriptive data can still reveal an important practical question.
This was a much smaller project than some of my experimental research, but I found it useful for a different reason.
It reminded me that not every useful research question requires a complicated statistical model. Sometimes a straightforward survey can reveal a mismatch between what an organization or institution provides and what people actually know is available.
At the same time, descriptive patterns leave a lot unanswered. These data cannot tell us why a particular student had not heard about STP or ACT. They cannot tell us whether greater awareness would change career decisions. They also cannot tell us whether the same patterns would appear in a larger or more representative sample.
I think that combination is useful. The survey gives enough information to identify a possible problem, but not enough to pretend that we already understand the mechanism behind it.
Availability is not the same as access. An opportunity becomes useful only after people know it exists and can realistically see themselves using it.
That idea is what stayed with me most. When thinking about professional development, I now pay more attention not only to whether resources exist, but also to how information moves through an environment and who may or may not encounter it.
08 · A grain of salt
How I would interpret these findings cautiously
I think this is an important part of presenting the project. The survey included 57 respondents. It was not designed as a probability sample of all psychology graduate students.
That means I would not use percentages such as 59% or 81% to claim that the same percentages apply to psychology graduate students nationally.
I would instead describe the results as patterns within this particular group of respondents. Those patterns are interesting because they point toward questions worth investigating on a larger scale.
The survey also measured reported awareness and perceived support. It does not establish what caused those experiences. For example, lower departmental support could reflect communication, program priorities, available teaching opportunities, student expectations, or factors that were not measured in this survey.
In other words, I think the findings are meaningful, but I would treat them as an invitation to investigate further rather than as a definitive diagnosis of graduate teaching support.
09 · If I continued the research
Moving from a snapshot toward explaining the pattern
A larger follow-up study could recruit students from a wider range of institutions and examine not only whether students know about teaching resources, but how they first encountered them.
I would also want to measure characteristics of the surrounding graduate environment. For example, does the department regularly circulate teaching opportunities? Are teaching careers discussed during professional development? Do faculty mentors vary in how often they discuss teaching?
From there, an intervention could test something concrete. A department might introduce a structured teaching-resource briefing or regular communication system and examine whether awareness, participation, or perceived support changes afterward.
That progression is what interests me: first identify the pattern, then understand the conditions associated with it, and finally test whether changing those conditions changes the outcome.
Original report
Read the GSTA team's published analysis
This portfolio page reflects my own interpretation of the project. For the original GSTA synopsis, reported findings, and project credits, please visit the published survey-results page.
Read the original GSTA survey report →Discussion
How did you learn about teaching opportunities in graduate school?
If you have experience as a graduate instructor, teaching assistant, faculty mentor, or program coordinator, I would be interested in hearing what actually helped you discover teaching resources and professional opportunities.
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