Charlene Higgins, a graduate student in the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire, has worked with the Organization for Refugee and Immigrant Success (ORIS) for several years. ORIS, an ethnic community-based organization, aims to aid refugees resettled in New Hampshire and help them become self-sufficient. Higgins’s familiarity and passion for the work translated into her Master in Community Development capstone project.

The New American Sustainable Agriculture Project (NASAP), a program within ORIS, assists new Americans by helping them, “build sustainable farm enterprises that are consistent with their culture and lifestyle aspirations and that strengthen regional, sustainable food systems as a whole.” Higgins’s capstone project included helping the NASAP farmers increase their impact by providing technical assistance and training with an end goal of “effective co-op management and access to consistent, secure and profitable markets.”

“The co-op farmers are [now] equipped with additional tools, skills and knowledge to help them successfully reach their self-defined goals within the co-op, and within their communities,” Higgins says. “My education has benefited my work by providing me with the understanding that unique individuals-- with unique cultural backgrounds, life-histories, and personalities-- will have different self-defined needs, desires, and priorities.” To learn more about Charlene’s work visit the University of New Hampshire website.

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Photo Credit: Charlene Higgins

Advanced degrees have long been associated with better career prospects and higher earnings. Women seem to be especially aware of that, as the Council of Graduate Schools/GRE Survey of Graduate Enrollment and Degrees noted that, in the fall of 2017, the majority of first-time graduate students at all levels were women. Among master’s degree candidates that fall, 59 percent were female while 53.5 percent of doctoral candidates were women.

Truong Xuan Tran’s academic path has been defined by transition. He began his undergraduate career as an electronic and telecommunications engineering student at the Hanoi University of Science and Technology in Vietnam. In 2010, he decided to make two important life changes: to attend graduate school in the United States and to change his research area to computer science. He would need to learn a new discipline and academic culture simultaneously.

Both of Tran’s decisions paid off, however. He thrived in his master’s program in computer science at Arkansas State University, so much so, that he was accepted into a doctoral program in computer science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). Positive mentorship has eased Tran’s transition into doctoral work. His advisor, Ramazan Aygun, is a leading computer scientist in the field of protein crystallization and has co-written academic papers with Tran and invited him to present alongside him at conferences.

“Protein crystallization is a difficult process where thousands of trials may need to be set up for a successful crystalline outcome," Aygun noted. Computer models can speed these trials but may introduce errors. Aygun and Tran have introduced a novel decision-tree classifier – “else-tree” – that reduces the misclassification of data samples by labeling them as undecided instead of misidentifying them as another class. “The key point of the else-tree is that it postpones difficult data to classify by sending them to its else branch until a good attribute can classify those samples,” Tran concluded.

Though their collaboration has already proved fruitful, Tran and Aygun have an ambitious forthcoming research agenda. “We plan to investigate the proposed algorithm on other types of problems such as multi-class classification," says Tran. "We will examine the effectiveness of our method on other datasets. Especially, we will work on improving the else-tree to reduce the percentage of undecided samples while keeping the error minimum by working on other datasets." To learn more about Tran’s work visit The University of Alabama in Huntsville website.

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Photo Credit: Truong Xuan Tran

According to a Council of Graduate Schools survey of more than 240 institutions, international graduate student applications fell by four percent between the fall of 2017 and the fall of 2018.  While the total number of international students in the U.S. grew last year to a total of over 1 million, new student enrollment declined by over six percent over the same period. 

As a doctoral candidate in environmental epidemiology at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, Amy Schultz studies the effects environmental factors have on our health. She is currently a leading research assistant on the CREATE: Cumulative Risks, Early Development, and Emerging Academic Trajectories project, which studies how children develop in their environments and seeks to identify sources of stress in preschool-aged children.

CREATE, a research study conducted by the Survey of the Health of Wisconsin (SHOW), uses a Language Environment Analysis (LENA) device that measures the number of words spoken between the parent and child to learn more about the child’s role in conversation. In addition, data that measure air quality, noise levels, and stress hormones are collected. While this particular study is small, researchers hope that it will establish the feasibility of conducting larger studies to better understand how children’s environments affect their learning and development. More information about how noise, air quality, and other environmental factors affect children’s health and development will help experts determine whether to develop interventions.

In developing the protocol for CREATE, Schultz took on a lot of responsibility, including training staff members and managing large amounts of data. “I learned a lot about how to efficiently train and prepare for going in the field, and then also I’ve learned how to be flexible and adapt, to be open to trial and error,” Shultz said. To learn more about Amy’s work visit the University of Wisconsin—Madison website.

Visit the GradImpact Feature Gallery to learn more about the amazing, innovative research being done by graduate students and alumni across the world.

Improving diversity, equity and inclusion in graduate education should involve intentional efforts to enhance student experience by cultivating a nurturing campus climate through broadening access, mitigating bias and providing strong support services.

Those were persistent themes Tuesday at “Strategies for Increasing Graduate Program Diversity,” a day of speakers, sessions and panels at American University presented by Educational Testing Service in collaboration with the Council of Graduate Schools.

According to TIAA, the free website program, developed with technology firm EVERFI Inc., utilizes research findings from a study of 13,000 graduate students over a three-year collaboration between TIAA, the Council of Graduate Schools and more than 30 universities.

The program leverages key findings from research conducted with 13,000 graduate students as part of a three-year collaboration among Council of Graduate Schools (CGS), TIAA and more than 30 leading universities.

At U.S. universities, the number of international graduate applications grew by 6 percent in mathematics and computer sciences between fall 2017 and fall 2018, according to the Council of Graduate Schools.

But some education advocates worry that new limits would disproportionately affect low-income students — particularly those who pursue a master's degree. Susan Ortega, head of the Council of Graduate Schools, told Inside Higher Ed that a postgraduate degree should not be looked at as a luxury.