How UTSA supports doctoral, postdoctoral scholars for success beyond the Ph.D.

Over the last five years, The Graduate School has helped close that gap with programming that bolsters a postdoc's professional acumen. The 3MT® Research Competition, for instance, provides graduate students the opportunity to showcase their scholarly work or research in three minutes or less. The competition encourages them to develop concise communication skills, showcase their work with the San Antonio community and initiate new collaborations and networks.

The Graduate School has also launched the Career Pathways guest speaker series to promote the career pursuits, career development and career impacts of UTSA's graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. These conversations focus on three key topics: personal career stories with UTSA Graduate School alumni; discussions of career trajectories with UTSA faculty, staff, administrators and city and state leaders; and national perspectives from leaders in industry and academia from across the U.S.

Katie McCance is a postdoctoral fellow who has flourished since becoming a Roadrunner through events like these. She participates in and helps coordinate the UTSA Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL) network, another initiative under the GPS umbrella, which promotes instructional excellence in STEM disciplines in higher education. Working with the CIRTL has given McCance the opportunity to expand her network through meetings with other institutions across the country. Together, they learn and share about mutual interests around college teaching. She's also a co-leader of the Postdoc Association at UTSA, which allows her to interact with postdocs across all disciplines.

"I was drawn to UTSA because I love the values and community here," McCance said. "Even during my interview, I could tell how supported I would be at UTSA because of the amazing faculty and mentors who care about postdocs and our success."

Although GPS programs like Career Pathways and CIRTL have been a great benefit to UTSA's graduate community, arguably nothing has been a bigger hit than The Graduate School's launch of micro-credentials through Credly, which gives master's students, doctoral students and postdocs the chance to earn credentials or "badges" for achieving professional competencies through various experiences like online sessions and workshops. Whether they're added to résumés or LinkedIn profiles, these micro-credentials show potential employers that Roadrunners at the graduate level have completed training in sought-after qualities such as leadership, conflict management, delegation and public speaking among many topics. There are also entire series of micro-credentials dedicated to generative AI, scholarly authorship and the first-year experience at UTSA.

Of course, none of these initiatives would be successful without the guidance provided by faculty mentors. In 2023, the UTSA Division of Academic Affairs implemented a new set of best practices for faculty mentoring graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Since then, grad students and postdocs at UTSA are working with their mentors on individual development plans that track their interests and career trajectories; being exposed to more conversations and opportunities involving career development; receiving constructive and timely feedback from their mentors; and are being supported in establishing and maintaining a healthy work-life balance. The results speak for themselves.

"We're seeing the positive outcomes," Mathur said. "Attrition is dropping, and for the first time ever, our overall doctoral student count has gone over 1,000."

A big driver in UTSA's rising doctoral student count can be further attributed to the university's improved retention efforts. One of those efforts has earned national acclaim. The Keep Running With Us (KRWU) program is a streamlined, invite-only admissions process that aims to keep talented UTSA undergraduate students and recent undergraduate alumni at the university to pursue a graduate education. Last year, the program was named a finalist in the graduate category of the 2023 Examples of Excelencia program by Excelencia in Education and was prominently featured this summer in Strategic Enrollment Management Quarterly.

KRWU removes many barriers to higher education for UTSA's best and brightest, offering more graduates like Karl Van Over '18 an opportunity to earn advanced degrees and encouraging them to stay in San Antonio to make a positive impact. Van Over had volunteered for many years as an English as a Second Language (ESL) tutor here in the Alamo City, and after obtaining his bachelor's degree in Interdisciplinary Studies, he was encouraged to apply through the KRWU program to pursue a Master's in Teaching English as a Second Language.

He earned that master's degree in 2020 and is now in his third semester pursing a Ph.D. in Culture, Literacy and Language through the UTSA College of Education and Human Development (COEHD). Van Over hopes he can offer a unique perspective and contribute to positive progress in second language education.

"I see myself as an outlier among my peers. I am not pursuing a career as a professional researcher or a university faculty member, but remaining committed to volunteering as an ESL tutor," Van Over said. "Thanks to the Keep Running With Us program and the support of COEHD's Department of Bicultural-Bilingual Studies and The Graduate School's faculty and staff, I am now positioned to meaningfully contribute to the growth of English language learners and improving the second language education field of study."

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.