Where do Grad Students Hang Out Online?
July 16, 2015 12:27 PM   Subscribe

Where do graduate students (especially in STEM disciplines) hang out online for the purpose of complaining about grad school and/or getting support for common grad school challenges?
posted by songs_about_rainbows to Education (7 answers total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
In my experience, Twitter.
posted by quaking fajita at 12:37 PM on July 16, 2015


The Chronicle forums, particularly this one.
posted by vegartanipla at 12:48 PM on July 16, 2015


The forums at PhD Comics used to be a big one, but they got hacked and it seems to be down indefinitely now. There's also PhinisheD (though that's maybe a bit less STEM-y overall), Grad Cafe, a ton of WordPress and other blogs (e.g. GradHacker), and, well, Ask Metafilter.

As a word of caution, though, I'd be careful about the amount of time you spend online in communities where people are doing a lot of complaining about their grad programs. Some amount of commiserating is definitely healthy, and of course having other people to problem-solve with is great; I've just noticed that beyond a certain point, it can have a sort of paradoxical effect on your motivation, where you just feel more burned-out instead of validated.
posted by en forme de poire at 12:55 PM on July 16, 2015 [5 favorites]


A good fraction of the traffic on Academia Stack Exchange seems to be geared towards graduate students in general, and the students tend to skew towards STEM.
posted by Johnny Assay at 12:57 PM on July 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


It's not the Metafilter Chat? Because, um, I'm there a lot and I'm not the only one...

Also facebook and twitter, yes.
posted by sciatrix at 1:01 PM on July 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


Interestingly enough, Tumblr has a fairly active grad community. Search #gradblr as a starting point.
posted by bluloo at 2:39 PM on July 16, 2015


Seconding Stack Exchange and searching on Tumblr. Twitter, too. You can probably start at the accounts of the likes above and keep digging around.
posted by pos at 8:00 AM on August 17, 2015


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