Developing and sustaining a research group: A novel approach to onboarding doctoral students

Abstract

Starting in a new institution, degree program, and research group can be a challenging transition for doctoral students. Although department and university orientations cover rules, deadlines, and resources, there are often fewer formal opportunities to onboard new graduate students in research groups. As a result, students can experience difficulty with a lack of understanding expectations and responsibilities, lack of communication with their mentors, and lack of community with their peers. To address these challenges and formalize the development of a culture, a civil engineering research group at a public research-intensive university in the southeastern United States participated in a retreat. The retreat took place over five days prior to the start of the fall 2019 semester at an off campus location. The motivation for the retreat was grounded in John P. Kotter's Leading Change process to create organizational transformation and improve the onboarding experience of the new doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers. Given the high attrition rates in graduate education, the retreat was also designed to foster retention by integrating attributes of the Workforce Sustainability model. The retreat was framed around four objectives: (1) build community, (2) communicate group norms and expectations, (3) develop individual strategic plans, (4) and introduce research skills. The retreat encouraged individual and collective reflection on goals, deliverables, and expectations. The experience was guided by the notion of beginning with the end in mind and, in this case, meant aligning individual professional development plans with that individual's long-term career goals and vision of the research group. The retreat was designed to construct a solid foundation on which to build individual and shared success. This paper describes the eight steps in the Leading Change process and its application to the pre-retreat planning, retreat assignments and activities, and post-retreat. The Workforce Sustainability model will also be discussed to illustrate how the eight attributes support the sustained performance of a research group and how each was intentionally cultivated during the retreat. Since self-reflection can help illuminate meaningful personal insights, each research group member was asked to submit written reflection on lessons learned, key takeaways, and outcomes from the retreat. Thematic analysis of the reflections revealed the value of the retreat in establishing connectivity and communication among members and creating an environment in which the doctoral students felt nurtured in their personal and professional development. This work details a novel approach to onboarding new members of a research group and aims to demonstrate the value of translating organizational change and workforce sustainability to academic environments.