The two years I spent in my Master’s program were some of the easiest and best of my life. Throughout the entirety of the program, I excelled at my coursework, concluding with a 4.0 overall GPA and rewarded with a scholarship to study abroad in France for a summer. At the time, I attributed my academic success to my own hard work: strong organizational and time management skills, decent academic writing, and frequent participation in class discussions. When I started my PhD, I expected the process and experience to be largely similar to those during my Master’s program. Instead, the first semester of my PhD hit me like a brick, damaging my self-confidence and replacing it with constant self-doubt. The question that continually nagged at me for five years was: “What is wrong with me that I am struggling so much?” I did not realize that there was a figurative reading list full of implicit expectations, rules, and behaviors that I never received from my program.
There is a hidden curriculum in grad school, composed of rules and behaviors that are rarely shared with grad students yet implicitly expected in order to succeed. Although some programs may make efforts to shed light on this hidden curriculum, many do not. What’s more, researchers have revealed the socioeconomic barrier that makes navigating the hidden curriculum easier or more challenging depending on the grad student (e.g, Calarco, 2018; Hopkins et al., 2024; Lyles et al., 2022). In her chapter inThe Poverty and Education Reader, Smith (2023) mentions the role that socioeconomic background plays in identifying and understanding the hidden curriculum of schools, where those with more socioeconomic power and privilege (i.e., heterosexual, white, affluent) have an easier time navigating this curriculum than those without such power and privilege (e.g., Hopkins et al., 2024). While there is no definitive list of hidden curriculum (see Calarco, 2020), three key components are that no one is going to make you do your work and that programs and professors have favorite grad students (even if they deny it).
At the start of my PhD, I (incorrectly) assumed that I would maintain a close professional relationship with my professors like I had previously during my undergraduate and Master’s programs. Yet, as I started the dissertation phase I realized that this was an unrealistic expectation. It was then that I realized the distinction between being a good student and a good researcher. I could write essays, take exams, and do group projects without much effort, but I didn’t have the faintest idea of how to complete a dissertation on my own. While my PhD committee members and chair were supportive and friendly, their support did not include an explicit outline of expectations, strict deadlines, or clear guidelines for my dissertation research. In fact, a professor I rarely spoke to in my program just happened to be in my chair’s office when I stopped by to ask for help (I had no clue what to research), and that professor was the one who suggested my dissertation focus (Without her suggestion, I may still be dissertating…). Since I began research coaching in 2020, clients have frequently shared similar experiences to mine with the same uncomfortable feeling of being alone to accomplish their dissertation. Unfortunately, some programs completely strand grad students. Over the last five years, I’ve met with countless grad students whose advisor abandoned them, they were never given an advisor, or their advisor was from an entirely different discipline. There is absolutely no excuse for that.
It is a hard pill to swallow, that it is neither your chair nor your committee’s responsibility to keep you on track with your research or even to occasionally check in with you. I have seen this gripe be even more pronounced among graduate students paying for their studies completely out-of-pocket, typically in fully online programs for working professionals. In the United States, these online PhD programs can cost anywhere from $288.16 per credit hour to $1,940 per credit hour (Education Data Initiative, February 2025 ). With 8 credit hours per term over a minimum of two years on the lower end, that is close to $10,000 of independent work. Yet, the Education Data Initiative (Hanson, September 2024) reports that the average PhD student loan debt balance in 2024 is much higher ($38,005). You can understand the double frustration of being in debt for a program that won’t provide more guidance. Honestly, I dug deep into a resource that I don’t regret relying on: pettiness. I’ve told many of my coaching clients that I truly finished my dissertation and my PhD out of spite for my program and its lack of support more than anything else.
Despite understanding that PhD committees and chairs are not expected to provide rigorous support to their students, research suggests that this kind of advisor-advisee relationship can affect graduate student well-being (Becerra et al., 2021) and retention (Kis et al., 2022). Blanchard and Haccoun (2019) surveyed 203 grad students and found that how supportive these students perceived their advisor (e.g., chair, tutor, PI) to be the less likely they were to drop out of their grad program, and the inverse is also true. When discussing the implications of the chair’s support on grad students, Blanchard and Haccoun (2019) assert that “advisors who display a significant amount of instrumental and emotional support while limiting micromanagement tendencies can potentially reduce dropout intentions significantly” (p. 14). In contrast, Breen et al. (2024) qualitatively explored negative doctoral-advisor relationships over four years, and noticed a few common themes in these relationships: mismatched workload expectations or priorities, gatekeeping of academic milestones (“slowing down students’ progress toward the degree”), lack of interest in student research by the advisor, and hostile interpersonal interactions. Extrapolating on the importance of the advisor-advisee relationship paired with the factors that negatively impact it (Breen et al., 2024), it seems that graduate students may benefit from more robust and positive one-on-one support. Indeed, faculty members (e.g., chairs, committee members) can provide invaluable insight to grad students, especially early on, by shedding light on essential skills, knowledge, and program values (Gardner, 2010). Anecdotally, it seems that today’s graduate students want that kind of support as well, as a cursory search online results in several pages of academic coaching companies for graduate students.
Building on the relationship between grad student and chair, another hidden factor is the implicit – and sometimes explicit – favoritism that chairs have towards certain grad students. Although your chair may never state it and perhaps not actually think it, the support you (perceive to) get may differ from that of another grad student. During my PhD, I already struggled with Imposter Syndrome (link) which was then compounded by what I perceived as favoritism towards certain members of my program by my chair and some professors on my committee. At the time, I was desperate to quit my PhD program because of the lack of support I felt, and my experience is not unique (Blanchard & Haccoun, 2019). Researchers such as Bahnson et al. (2022) and Blanchard and Haccoun (2019) have explored this phenomenon and posited that chairs may appear to favor grad students with certain characteristics (e.g., gender, year in program, financial resources, alignment with chair’s research interests). Bahnson et al. (2022) claim that “the hierarchy too quickly becomes based on social relationships rather than ability and merit” continuing that “the importance of social interaction and privileged access reflects a ruling relation that allows advisors to give an access advantage to some students and not others” (p. 65). For instance, two engineering grad students who self-identify as female were interviewed by Bahnson et al. (2022) and both perceived that their advisor favored members of their cohort who were more financially privileged or self-identified as male. Scholars such as Jones (2024) and Woods et al. (2021) have recently explored this phenomenon through a Critical Race Theory and Critical Race Feminism lens, finding that Black grad students (especially Black women) feel the need to self-silence and struggle independently to safely navigate their program due to lack of support with a racialized tinge (e.g., microaggressions, racist stereotypes) in grad school.
If there is one message I’d like to impart, it is this: Chairs, please make better efforts to help your advisees if only to help them understand the unspoken rules and expectations for success in grad school. For me, it was extremely frustrating and discouraging to feel like my peers were getting more support than me, but I even noticed it with other grad students who seemed to be given less support and also treated less kindly and patiently by their chair than others. Some quit the program. Whether this unequal treatment among grad students by chairs (advisor, tutor, supervisor, etc.) is true or simply perceived does not matter. So chairs, this is not a personal attack, but rather a gentle suggestion to support all of your advisees equally and to give them the figurative hand you would’ve appreciated when you were in their position.