Student-Led Climate Assessment Promotes a Healthier Graduate School Environment

This article describes a graduate student-led effort to develop a climate survey to assess, advocate for, and improve the well-being and mental health of graduate students and postdocs in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Graduate students have an increased incidence of depression relative to the general population, and given the transient nature of the student population, understanding and addressing mental health concerns can be challenging. The goal of this article is to illustrate how students, with the support of departmental faculty, staff, and existing on-campus mental health resources, can take the lead to investigate and assess issues related to the challenging graduate school environment. We describe the student-led development and implementation of and the subsequent follow-up to a department-wide survey aimed at destigmatizing the subject of mental health and fostering a more supportive community. This article serves as a framework to assist other interested and motivated graduate students who, with the support of local faculty, wish to develop and initiate a similar process in their own departments. We demonstrate that student-led actions can effectively tackle department-level problems and encourage other interested students to initiate a similar effort.