Stanford GradsTeachGrads

I founded GradsTeachGrads to provide a platform for the grad students to teach and learn various skills from one another that are outside the scope of a classroom

The GradsTeachGrads initiative was awarded the Stanford SPICE grant (Student Projects for Intellectual Community Enhancement grant) for 2020-21 and 2021-22!

Full working site coming up soon. Feel free to reach out at nanbhas@stanford.edu if get in touch with us or want to be involved in the organization.

Some additional details provided below:

About

Graduate school provides rigorous training for advanced study in a student’s preferred area of expertise. Stanford is unique in that it places very few restrictions on what courses a grad student can or cannot take outside their department. While this has helped many grad students explore, branch out and get an allround graduate school experience, taking courses is a heavy time commitment that most cannot afford, especially later into their PhD. Moreover, there are many professional and technical skills that are never explicitly taught in an academic setting but grad students are expected to know or even master. Coming to the non-technical side of things, there is almost no opportunity for grad students to branch out their hobbies or explore other enjoyable things to do without explicitly knowing what they want to try and spending a lot of time getting into it. More often than not, their exposure is constrained to what their set of friends and acquaintances do for fun.

Through this initiative, I envision bringing a community of graduate students together to teach and learn from one another various technical, professional and even fun skills that are outside the scope of a classroom or formal education. These skills include valuable lessons learnt by experience, timely advice/guidance given to them from different mentors, coping strategies for various situations and cool, pleasing hobbies that people have picked up. I hope to minimize the feeling of isolation that inevitably creeps up in a PhD student once the required courses are out of the way. I want to enhance peer-to-peer support that lowers barriers of entry through creating shared experiences. While there are many resources available in and out of Stanford for individual topics mentioned below, it is more powerful to hear from the voices of diverse Stanford students what worked and didn’t work for them. Irrespective of how the covid situation evolves, I believe the programs listed below are flexible and can be adapted really well to both an online video experience or a safe, social-distance maintaining, limited in-person group experience.

How will it work?

• Prepare weekly content in any of the “tracks” listed below
  • media: blog entry, video recordings, podcast, email-listserv, etc
• d.school’s people-first approach:
  • Monthly empathetic interviews with a graduate student, recent grad or postdoc.
  • Interviewees will have the option of remaining anonymous
• Online grad student community:
  • Sub Reddit / Slack group
• Potentially on a per quarter basis:
  • Handson workshops
  • Hackathons
  • Keynote talks by invited Stanford Professor/Alumni

Tracks