Transcending disciplinary boundaries is becoming increasingly important for devising solutions to the world's most pressing issues, such as climate change and food insecurity. Institutions of higher education often present challenges to teaching students how to work and innovate on transdisciplinary teams. We first define transdisciplinarity and…

Social media provides a promising platform for members of informal and formal educational communities to build community, collaborate, and support institutional goals such as student recruitment. Despite burgeoning research on the educational uses of social media, we are not aware of any to guide graduate program social media use. In order to…

Changes in the funding and delivery of research programmes at the university level have, in recent years, resulted in significant changes to research supervision. This paper critically reviews key influences effecting postgraduate supervision. Analysis draws on literature spanning 2000-2010 to determine the appropriateness of traditional models of…

A research project is described that concerns "temporal adjustment" as one form of a non-wage adjustment in the academic labor market. Receipt of the doctorate, the number and length of post-doctoral fellowships, and the achievement of tenure are temporal factors in academic careers. The change in timing of these factors is a form of…

This annual compilation examines issues in the shaping and adaptation of the modern university, in five articles. The first article, by Amy Sue Bix, is titled "'Backing into Sponsored Research': Physics and Engineering at Princeton University, 1945-1970." It reviews the process by which Princeton University (New Jersey) made a series of…

Four problems that will be of major concern to academic institutions granting graduate degrees in the coming decade and ways in which sponsored research can help solve them are discussed. The four problems are defined as: (1) the threat posed to research performed by faculty by increased teaching loads; (2) the increasing lack of opportunities for…

This paper proposes a model for graduate student success and reports the results of a study of factors affecting the success of 40 first-year graduate students. Based on a review of the literature, a four-element model for graduate success was devised that focused on: (1) immersion in research activities; (2) academic regimen and planning; (3)…

The Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) Cooperative Validity Studies Project began in 1975 to fill the need for cooperation between graduate schools and testing agencies and for graduate level validity studies. More than 150 data sets from the 39 participating schools, representing over 19 fields of study, were analyzed. The data confirmed earlier…

In a report entitled "Reshaping the Graduate Education of Scientists and Engineers" (National Academy of Sciences, 1995), the Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy proposed a modified PhD training model that retains an emphasis on intensive research experiences, while incorporating additional experiences to prepare graduates for an…