After the very community-focused atmosphere of undergraduate education, graduate school can be an isolating experience. Michigan State University graduate students Katy Meyers and Alex Galarza have created an online solution to that problem with GradHacker.org, a community forum for graduate students that has taken off across the United States and beyond.
“GradHacker was a way to create a community,” says Meyers, “and not just to have this community in Michigan, but a national and global community having a conversation about grad school.”
The site began as an offshoot of the Cultural Informatics Initiative, a program Meyers participated in to combine digital resources to issues in the humanities and social science fields.
“We got on Twitter and LinkedIn and learned how we could put our dissertations online,” Meyers says. “We decided to have a bootcamp for other grand students. We learned that the were tips that other grad students had, and we decided to make a forum to share those things.”
Graduate students across the county did have things to share, and they flocked to the site to read blogs, participate in forums and connect in other ways. The popularity of
GradHacker.org, which has only been up and running since June of 2011, recently caught the eye of the
Inside Higher Ed publication. GradHacker and IHE now have a contract to share content.
The new venture continues to grow. GradHacker now has eight full time bloggers, and Meyers and Galarza will soon add podcasts and more bootcamps to the website.
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