If you missed your chance in the spring to respond to the Survey of Graduate Communication Support, you can still weigh in: In order to gather further data, the authors have reopened the survey until November 3, 2025. Take the survey here.
“The findings of the survey will expand the groundbreaking work of Nigel Caplan and Michelle Crow in 2016 and will allow us to better understand the services and programs that support graduate students’ communication development,” write survey authors Dr. Marilyn Gray, Dr. Talinn Phillips, and (again) Dr. Crow. “With this survey revision, we also aim to longitudinally track the ways that graduate communication support changes over time.”
The three have “provided communication support for graduate students at their respective institutions for over a decade and have also been heavily involved in the creation and development of the CGC. We believe strongly in the importance of communication support for (post)graduate students’ success and want to facilitate sharing knowledge about the best ways to do that work. We invite you to help us by completing the survey.”
Crow, Gray, and Phillips presented preliminary results of the survey at the CGC’s Summer Institute in June but want to give a larger group of people the chance to share their views and experience in order to gather as comprehensive a view of the current state of the field as possible.
The survey is open to anyone directly providing communication support to (post)graduate or professional students or anyone who directs or supervises such a program, unit, or initiative (e.g., a dean of a graduate school). Multiple people from a single institution may complete the survey, and it is hoped that if an institution has multiple programs, at least one person from each program will complete the survey.
“While some questions may be best answered by a program director, others focus on individuals–their educational backgrounds, expertise, and the structure of their positions,” write the authors, “and thus we aim to collect responses from anyone who directly provides graduate communication support and/or from anyone who can report about an institution’s support services for graduate students.”
The authors plan to share their results at the CGC’s 2026 virtual Summer Institute and also to share a report of their results through open-access and eventually through peer-reviewed publications.
For questions about the survey or this study, review this Study Information Sheet or contact any of the authors directly: Dr. Michelle Crow (michelle.cox@cornell.edu), Dr. Marilyn Gray (mgray@saonet.ucla.edu), or Dr. Talinn Phillips (tiller@ohio.edu).
