To enable innovation and change within graduate education, there is a need to explore all levers for change. This study aims to define one such lever: the role of faculty who lead graduate programs [i.e. graduate program directors (GPDs)]. These faculty shape departmental structures and support the overall graduate student experience.
Semistructured interviews were conducted with seven GPDs from across the USA. Probability to proportion sampling, along with purposive sampling, allowed us to gather a diverse sample of engineering GPDs and capture the breadth of GPDs’ roles and responsibilities they hold within their programs. An open coding methodology with thematic and categorical analyses was used to examine the GPDs’ descriptions of their roles and responsibilities within their programs.
The combined analyses produced six task-based categories described as “hats” that GPDs used to respond to student needs and programmatic responsibilities: Administrator, Guide, Mediator, Delegator, Confidant and Change Maker.
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work provides one of the first papers to clearly define the GPD role and actions taken from the perspective of those who hold the position. The identification of hats offers a foundation for faculty to better conceptualize the role, administrators to consider how they might support faculty training and transitions into this role, and scholars to meaningfully integrate GPDs in change efforts that aim to improve graduate education.
Introduction
While graduate education can foster innovation, knowledge development, and leadership skills in students, persistent problems affecting students continue to limit their growth. These problems include severe inequity (Posselt, 2020), high rates of mental health challenges (National Academies of Sciences and Medicine, 2018), and excessive attrition (Sowell et al., 2015; Sallai and Berdanier, 2024). Within fields such as engineering, these problems are paired with substantial resistance to change (Lee et al., 2024; Bahnson et al., 2024; Bork and Mondisa, 2022), suggesting a critical need to expose different levers that make change possible (Lee et al., 2024; Posselt, 2020). To address problems in engineering graduate education and graduate education broadly, the bulk of the research has focused on advisor-advisee relationships (e.g. Artiles and Matusovich, 2020; Burt et al., 2021; Perez et al., 2019; McCain and Roksa, 2023), student experiences (e.g. Bahnson et al., 2023; Coley and Thomas, 2023), and policies that influence students’ experiences throughout graduate education (e.g. Posselt, 2020; Lee et al., 2024).
For this study, we focus on faculty in leadership and administrative roles within a specific graduate program as a portion of their overall annual assignments. We use the USA definition of faculty in this paper, referring to professors who engage in research, teaching, and service at their institution. While various titles are used for this role (e.g. directors of graduate studies and directors of postgraduate research programs), in this paper, they will be referred to as graduate program directors (GPDs).
Little work has examined faculty who lead specific graduate programs that are often connected to disciplinary departments (McAlpine et al., 2024; Kayyali et al., 2023; Petersen et al., 2017; Gunnison, 2025; Wiener and Peterson, 2019). Faculty who serve as GPDs shape departmental procedures, enact institutional policies, and disrupt power dynamics between faculty and students (Council of Graduate Schools and the JED Foundation, 2021; Ortega, 2003). Similarly, in British and Swedish contexts, equivalent roles for program directors (e.g. professional education programs) include tasks with multiple functions, such as building education structures, fostering individual and relational support, negotiating interests, and influencing departmental or university culture (Aitken and O’Carroll, 2020; Frydén et al., 2015). Meaningfully incorporating GPDs to create change would leverage how they actively shape graduate education experiences around institutional and disciplinary norms (Lee et al., 2024). To facilitate the ability of scholars, change agents, and university leaders to address long-standing challenges in graduate education, there is a need to clearly articulate the GPD role and the approaches individuals use to support their programs and students.
Purpose
Despite the presence of GPDs across different program types (Gunnison, 2025), little work defines the role and how it is enacted. To address the ambiguity of the role of GPDs in graduate engineering education, this paper seeks to define this faculty position by examining how individuals enact different aspects of their leadership role. By articulating what it means to be a GPD, we can make the expectations and practices that shape graduate education explicit, thus revealing new levers for change and innovation.
We ground our work in the calls to action from the Council of Graduate Schools by exploring and promoting institutional responsibility (2021). We recognize that GPDs reside in positions of power within graduate programs, affecting all aspects of a student’s transition into, through, and out of a graduate program as they oversee admissions, program milestones, and professional development opportunities (Ortega, 2003). It is our hope that this work will serve as a foundation to guide positive change in graduate education by shaping the actions of those in positions of power.
Background
For GPDs, there is an assumption that the strategies and approaches they used as faculty members will translate into the responsibilities and scale of their roles (Ortega, 2003). This assumption carries the detrimental implication that faculty are already prepared for these positions. However, faculty often enter these roles without training and resources (Martin, 2022; Gunnison, 2025; Petersen et al., 2017; Ortega, 2003). This leadership transition includes challenges such as lack of knowledge and confidence about the role, loss of peer support, imposter syndrome, loss of autonomy over their schedule, feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of the role, and developing new relationship dynamics (Douglas et al., 2021; Qazi, 2020; McAlpine et al., 2024; Aitken and O’Carroll, 2020). While some universities provide leadership programs for faculty (Hornsby et al., 2012; Davidson et al., 2001; Ortega, 2003), there is a lack of support for those entering GPD roles (McAlpine et al., 2024; Gunnison, 2025). This absence of professional development and the challenges transitioning to this leadership position highlight uncertainty in what it means to serve as a GPD. To overcome the challenges faced by graduate students and the system of graduate education, there is a need for GPDs and programs to understand the existing bounds of and opportunities within the role.
While the influence of university-wide administrative leadership and faculty mentorship of graduate students’ experiences is well documented (Lovitts, 2002; Artiles et al., 2025; Burt et al., 2018; Aziz et al., 2005; Bozeman et al., 2013), little exists on the role of GPDs in shaping graduate education (Kayyali et al., 2023; Gunnison, 2025; Wiener and Peterson, 2019; Ortega, 2003). A scoping review of engineering and science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education literature found only thirteen articles that mentioned GPDs – the most common term referring to this role (Petersen et al., 2017) – over 10 years (Kayyali et al., 2023). Across the articles synthesized in the scoping review, GPDs were briefly mentioned and often seen as instruments to further other work or goals (e.g. implement a holistic evaluation rubric, support student training programs, and disseminate marketing material) rather than as autonomous individuals with power in a larger system. Using terminology from the USA and global contexts (i.e. graduate program director, director of postgraduate research programs and director of graduate studies), six additional publications centering GPDs’ experiences were found. Similar messaging was found across these publications:
little work has explored the role of GPDs;
the role is ill-defined with unclear boundaries;
it is not a formalized role at most institutions; and
the scope of work is broad and ever-increasing.
The types of work described in these papers focused on administrative responsibilities (e.g. admissions, recruitment, and paperwork) and mediation between faculty and students. However, these studies prescribed what the role included, often by using the same instrument and lacked transferability to support GPDs who are navigating and negotiating their role (Gunnison, 2025; Petersen et al., 2017; Wiener and Peterson, 2019). As such, a need exists to clearly define the different actions that GPDs use to enact their role from their perspectives.
Methods
Study context
This work is part of a larger research project that explored how engineering GPDs used healing practices to respond to trauma in their graduate programs. The data presented in this study emerged from interviews exploring participants’ roles as GPDs, their conceptualizations of trauma, and how they responded to trauma in their graduate engineering programs. While the data collection processes were shaped by this larger project, specific questions within the interview protocol and our analytic focus aided in defining the GPD role and how it was enacted. An explicit focus on trauma (Chavez-Dueñas et al., 2019) is beyond the scope of this work. All study activities were approved by the corresponding and anchor authors’ institutional review boards.
Positionality
Our research team, composed mostly of women in engineering education, had individuals with varying racial and ethnic identities (i.e. Latin, Middle Eastern, and White) that shaped our lived experiences in graduate programs and approaches to our research. Two members of the research team were engineering faculty members who served as GPDs overseeing the creation of new PhD programs while also navigating these programs through the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial justice protests of 2020. Their work as GPDs acknowledged a need to define the GPD role to better serve students and faculty, including themselves, within graduate programs. The research team also included four engineering education graduate students, of whom two are authors, who were involved in data collection and analysis. Our team intentionally included graduate student voices throughout the research process, as we viewed the collaboration between faculty and graduate students as pivotal for supporting change within graduate education. In addition, each research team member had experiences in graduate education ranging from positive interactions with GPDs to negative experiences that motivated goals for change.
Sampling and recruitment
When sampling, we aimed to gather a diverse sample of engineering GPDs in the USA to capture the breadth of GPDs’ different roles and responsibilities within their programs. Using existing data on doctoral programs and our prior work, we generated a list of GPD contacts. Borrowing from quantitative and mixed methods traditions aligned with our larger study, we used probability to proportion sampling to ensure the sample frame generated represented the broader population (Bahnson et al., 2022; Perkins et al., 2018). Programs were sampled across four criteria:
state;
engineering discipline (i.e. civil, nuclear);
total PhDs granted between 2014 and 2017 for the program; and
total PhDs granted between 2014 and 2017 for the college.
Graduate programs were sorted by size based on the number of doctoral degrees granted: small (1–6 doctorates), medium (7–19 doctorates) or large (19–225 doctorates).
In addition, we conducted purposive sampling with minority-serving institutions and institutions whose highest degree awarded was a master’s to capture the range of GPD experiences (National Academies of Sciences and Medicine, 2018). Minority-serving institutions in the USA are institutions with either an “express purpose of providing access to higher education for a specific minority group” or student enrollment with a high proportion of students from a particular minority group (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2019, p. 40). One example is a Hispanic-serving institution (HSI), where at least 25% of the undergraduate students enrolled identify as having a Latin American origin or heritage. Overall, 45 GPDs were contacted over multiple rounds of recruitment; eight participated in semistructured interviews.
Participants
Of the eight participants who completed interviews, seven (n = 7) were included in the analysis. One participant was excluded as their role was not that of a GPD but a graduate student services coordinator. An examination of this important role is beyond the scope of this study. Table 1 contains descriptive participant information with participant-selected pseudonyms. Our participants were from different program sizes, disciplines, and geographic locations, reflecting but not perfectly matching the broader population. We masked state information with a geographic region and removed specific numbers of PhD students who graduated to prevent reidentification. Demographic information of GPDs was not collected. We use the gender-neutral singular “they” to refer to each participant.
Participant descriptive information, including pseudonym, faculty title, graduate administrator title, school descriptor and engineering discipline
| Participantpseudonym | Faculty title | Graduate administrator title | Schooldescriptor | Discipline |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Keith | Endowed professor | Graduate Program Chair | Large Public Southwestern HSI | Electrical engineering |
| Hope | Professor | Graduate Officer and Equity Officer | Large Private Northeastern PWI | Electrical and computer engineering |
| Spring | Named professor | Associate Chair for Graduate Studies | Large Public Southeastern PWI | Mechanical engineering |
| Dr. Pepper | Professor | Graduate Advisor | Large Public Southern HSI | Computer science |
| Pina Colada | Professor and founding chair | Department Chair | Small Public Southern HBCU | Civil and environmental engineering |
| April | Associate professor | Graduate Program Director | Medium Public Southwestern PWI | Chemical engineering |
| Maple | Associate professor | Director of the Graduate Program | Large Public Midwestern PWI | Biomedical engineering |
*HSI = Hispanic-serving institution; PWI = predominately-white institution; HBCU = historically black college and university
Data collection
We conducted virtual interviews with each participant to understand the roles and responsibilities of the GPDs and their experiences as they worked to support students and lead their programs. Interviews lasted between 60 and 90 min and were conducted by a graduate student interviewer. Our interview protocol was developed by adapting existing tools in graduate education literature (Bahnson et al., 2022), faculty research (Cutler and Coso Strong, 2023), and trauma and healing (Chavez-Dueñas et al., 2019). The protocol was piloted by the research group with one researcher taking a turn as an interviewer, interviewee, and observer. After debriefing about the interview, the protocol was modified to ensure clarity of the questions and that the interview held space for the sensitivity of the questions. This process was repeated four times, with no changes occurring in the last two cycles. The final protocol opened with questions focused on the role and responsibilities of a GPD. Then, the interviewers asked the GPDs to reflect on the lived experiences of graduate students in their program. As part of these questions, we inquired about the actions GPDs took in their day-to-day activities and in support of students. The interview also included questions about the role of the department and institution in these matters. All interviews were professionally transcribed and checked for accuracy.
Data analysis
Multiple researchers analyzed each transcript using an open coding methodology and developed emergent themes (MacQueen et al., 1998; Saldaña, 2015; Miles et al., 2014; DeCuir-Gunby et al., 2011). Open coding included a structural coding pass, a pattern coding pass, and researcher refinement. After establishing structural codes, the researchers analyzed the interviews based on preliminary data-driven codes. These codes included:
tasks related to the responsibilities of the GPD
GPD role context captured any contextual background for the role (e.g. choice to take on the role, support);
trauma, in which GPDs explain their specific actions or protocols they use to respond to student trauma
philosophy and approach to the role, which captured the individuals’ beliefs about the role of GPD, their relationships to students and their prior experiences.
These four preliminary codes provided the foundation for our discussion of GPD responsibilities and the different approaches they used to support their students.
To confirm coding consistency, the two researchers who performed the structural and pattern coding passes compared their codes to reach consensus. At coding debrief meetings, subcodes were added, modified or deleted to more adequately capture the perceptions and experiences of the GPDs. During these meetings, critical debriefers, who had different levels of familiarity with the data, asked questions, raised concerns, or noted patterns across the data. The product of the open coding process was one set of final codes agreed upon by all researchers. Through an iterative process that moved from structural to pattern coding, initial themes emerged about how GPDs performed specific tasks to support students at personal and departmental levels.
The research team used collaborative brainstorming resources to interpret the initial themes and generate participant profiles. We engaged in a two-phase interpretation approach: generating themes with supporting evidence [thematic analysis; Saldaña (2015, p. 303)] and classifying GPDs based on the different tasks they enacted (categorical analysis). Thematic analysis involved displaying initial themes gathered throughout the coding process using participant quotations as evidence to support the themes. Using the visualization of the themes written and shown alongside each other, we noticed further classifications of tasks the GPDs performed. Based on these classifications, we grouped GPD task categories and the supporting quotes from the participants. The combined analyses produced task-based categories we called “hats” that GPDs wore to respond to student needs and programmatic responsibilities. The hats evolved predominantly from the first preliminary code (tasks), but all four codes (listed earlier) were used to inform the six different hats presented in this paper. Throughout the interviews, participants often used “hats” to describe the different aspects of their role. In addition, this term has been used in STEM faculty development contexts to allude to the different responsibilities of STEM faculty (Lee et al., 2017). We use hats as an explanatory tool to ground our interpretations and classifications of participants’ experiences as GPDs.
Limitations
The results presented in this paper provide rich accounts of how engineering GPDs define and enact their role. While the results are transferable to graduate programs within other disciplines, they lack contextual features that may shape how GPDs approach their role and support students. Programs in disciplines such as English, where students have limited funding from grants, or Business, with students funded by corporations, may require different hats to be worn by their GPDs. The necessarily small sample for rich accounts of GPDs’ experiences limits the diversity and representative nature of our sample. In addition, the broader framing of our work around trauma and responding to trauma could have potentially limited the number of hats discussed by participants in the interviews. We do not assume that the list of hats provided is exhaustive, but the presented hats provide an instructive framing of how GPDs perform their role.
Results
Across the interviews, we generated six hats to describe the actions and approaches GPDs took within their roles (Table 2). While the data included examples of GPDs wearing multiple hats to approach a situation or part of the role, the focus of the following results is to provide definitions of the individual hats, along with examples and discussions of variations of how GPDs wore the hats.
Engineering GPD roles and role definitions
| Roles | GPD role definition |
|---|---|
| Administrator | Signs and processes administrative paperwork |
| Guide | Directs students in their graduation plans, helps them make course decisions, and regulates important deadlines by offering advice |
| Mediator | Intervenes between students and advisors to come to an agreement or actionable result |
| Delegator | Transfers responsibility for a student or current situation to appropriate outside support resources |
| Confidant | Listens to and communicates with students confidentially about issues of trauma or other serious concerns |
| Change maker | Uses power as GPD to change policy or create organizations/events for students in need or who request help |
Administrator
Aligning with previous work, all GPDs wore the administrator hat as administrative tasks were central to their role (Gunnison, 2025). Administrator tasks included processing paperwork, programs of study, course registrations, admissions decisions and student evaluations. When GPDs put on this hat, they embodied the person or representative for the program who had the power to sign off on documents and decisions. In their interview, Pina Colada quickly produced a list of their administrative tasks and responsibilities:
One is all the decisions related to the admissions. That’s the one thing. The second thing is degree requirements and the change in curriculum, so I oversee all the changes in the curriculum. The third aspect is financial aid, so it depends, but sometimes there is a tuition waiver recommendation.
Across interviews, participants were quick to mention administrative tasks and the ways these tasks were central to the GPD role. Often, these tasks were mentioned in list form and were not described in rich detail by the participants.
In contrast to this list approach, some participants recognized the power they had when wearing the administrator hat, like Hope and Maple, who discussed using administrative tasks to achieve student-supporting goals. Hope highlighted how they created additional structure in the admissions process to enhance equity:
I try to read 100% of the applications from underrepresented minority students. And I put together a small team of three additional people, and we read 100% of all the women applications to make sure for both groups of underrepresented people that nobody falls through the cracks.
Maple similarly wore their administrative hat to provide flexibility in timelines and processes to support students and to train staff to do the same.
Unsurprisingly, GPDs mentioned the administrative portion of their role by illuminating a commonly shared aspect: a broad range of tasks that required administrative oversight and handling. The quotes captured how GPDs wore the hat for student-supporting processes and administrative tasks.
Guide
The guide hat was worn when GPDs advised students on milestones and components of the engineering graduate experience (e.g. course requirements, comprehensive exams, proposals, defenses). Specifically, GPDs wore the guide hat when advising about program milestones, implementing orientation discussions for course selection, and directing students through deadlines. Given the diversity of contexts these GPDs came from, there was variation in the extent of their time spent wearing the guide hat, yet each wore this hat. Keith reflected on one component of their responsibilities as GPD:
The other big part is managing and overseeing everything that relates to advising, student matters, and programs of studies. Starts from recruiting students in the program, admitting students, going through the advising, shepherding them through the course sequence, assigning course numbers.
All the GPDs revisited moments when they shepherded, coordinated, advised, or directed a student or groups of students in their programs. This guidance was provided by the GPDs because a student was non-thesis (i.e. a course-based degree), was not working with an advisor, or required support from someone other than their advisor. Maple and Spring shared examples of these bounds of the guide hat within their contexts. Maple described:
I cover everything else, primarily advising for all graduate students that are especially non-thesis because once they’re a thesis [student], they join a lab and that mentor becomes their main advisor, but before they join a lab and anyone that’s non-thesis, I advise them, and that includes holding the orientation when they start [their]plan of study, pick classes, career advising and seminars.
Spring further provided examples of graduate student advising that were outside of thesis research (i.e. research with a primary advisor or supervisor):
There’s aspects of advising graduate students broadly on, not on their thesis research, there are thesis advisors who do that, but all aspects of graduate experience from including mental health issues, not as being a provider of the service, but when they have challenges, any challenges associated with working with their graduate advisors, with their peers.
GPDs like Maple and Spring interacted frequently with students, while other GPDs, due to the structure or size of their program, worked with large teams. For Hope, the guide hat included not only aiding in orientation for new graduate students but also working with a team to accomplish most of the tasks under this hat. Hope’s team members would then be the ones wearing the guide hat in their frequent interactions with students during the semester.
Confidant
The GPDs wore the confidant hat, one not found in previous research, as a first step to confidentially address student trauma or other serious concerns. Wearing the confidant hat was paired with GPDs creating safe, private spaces for students to speak with them. Due to the large departments or other administrative loads, neither Keith nor Pina Colada mentioned being a confidant.
As confidants, GPDs discussed a procedure involving four actions: setting the stage, listening, generating actions and assessing the result. Those in the role longer had crafted this process through experience. In contrast, those newer to the role or with competing obligations (i.e. high administrative loads) had less well-defined pathways. April noted that they set the stage by:
Begin[ning] the conversation by saying that, ‘Whatever you tell me is going to be confidential. Nobody will come to know, unless you want me to. But then if you are exhibiting tendencies where you are suicidal, then I need to report. Or if you tell me that you have been sexually assaulted, I'm obligated to report that incident.’
April’s comment, echoed by others, reflected the need to support students through difficult or traumatic events by following self-generated procedures and practices outlined by the institution. The GPDs hoped that by being open and transparent, the students would feel comfortable sharing with them.
Once the GPDs moved into the conversation with students, they focused their actions as a confidant to listen to students:
When they come to that first meeting, I just sit there and listen. I don’t take any notes. I shut my phone off. I shut my computer off. I just sit there and listen, and I just let them tell me anything they want. I don’t ask questions. I basically say, ‘How are you?’ And that’s the last thing I need to say because they just start telling me. ∼Hope
Like Hope, Maple maintained an open-door policy and strove to wear the confidant hat when appropriate, but did not have many processes to guide them in supporting students. Furthermore, some GPDs, like Dr. Pepper, stopped wearing the confidant hat at this stage. Those who stopped either did not offer students solutions or put on the delegator hat (see subsequent section).
After listening, GPDs often generated different actions students could use to navigate a difficult situation:
If you [the graduate student] have to change advisor, if you have to change lab, if you have to take a semester off, we can work those things out. If something is really bothering them, I usually tell them to, if some students crying or something like that, I tell them to just take this day off, don’t think about it for a while, and then revisit the issue. Let me talk to X, Y, and Z so you don’t have to worry about it. ∼Maple
The GPDs also noted that these actions required assessment to determine whether they effectively resolved the situation that triggered the wearing of the confidant hat. Spring explained how these results were often longitudinal and required GPDs to check-in with students:
As you start resolving it, hopefully it’s either fully resolved. Even if it’s fully resolved, you usually have certain checks in place you put anywhere from continuous contacts with the students to look at indirect indicators, continuous monitoring, there is no recurrence.
The confidant hat was commonly worn by GPDs and was used to support students and to generate actions to address traumatic or negative experiences. Most GPDs were fairly detailed in their descriptions of this hat while indicating that their actions were not part of formalized processes but developed from experience and necessity.
Delegator
The delegator hat captured the actions of the GPDs when they handed off responsibility to others, either internally to the program or college or externally to campus services. For GPDs within this study, they largely discussed wearing this hat in reaction to a concern or problem raised by a student, as Dr. Pepper explained:
The main thing I do is I encourage them to talk to our program on campus, the counseling and professional and psychological services, [Counseling Services] is the name of it, that has a variety of resources. So, to some degree, we refer people there. There’s a lot of students that are encouraged to go there, if they’re dealing with mental stress, mental issues of various sorts.
Five of the seven GPDs wore this hat to varying degrees, with some relying on the delegator hat as their response to a student concern that went beyond what they felt they should address in their role, and others who used it more sparingly. Keith and Dr. Pepper used the delegator hat in a manner that suggested boundaries to the GPD role. Keith explained:
So in my role, it’s more typically again the kind of recognizing these scenarios, and then, handing them off to the appropriate Dean’s Office with a brief characterization, ‘Okay, this is what’s going on, this is what we have observed at our level, at the program level.’ This goes now beyond what we can handle here.
In contrast, Maple, April, and Hope wore this hat after engaging with students to direct them to support resources based on their needs. April explained, “So for me, the first and foremost thing is to be able to maintain confidentiality. And second one is be understanding in what they’re going through, and pointing them to the sources that are available […]” In this example, and others within their interview, April appeared to reserve wearing the delegator hat for after understanding the student and their situation further. The participants noted that the delegator hat was necessary to support students, with some using it as their initial response and others using it after using another hat, like confidant, when they hit the limit of what they could do.
Mediator
Like delegator, the mediator hat was only used by five of the seven participants, and at times reluctantly, when GPDs intervened between a student and primary advisor to reach an agreement or actionable results. GPDs who wore the mediator hat saw it as necessary. April put on this hat to create successful compromises that supported both students and faculty:
[…] because whenever there are two parties involved, I want to be able to hear both sides. And then the truth is somewhere in between. So when I try to figure out what we can do, I look at the various options and then present those to both the advisor as well as the student and then see whether we can have a compromise which has been successful.
Spring, Keith and Dr. Pepper, however, were reluctant to wear it as they wanted to avoid policing faculty and students or being in the middle of difficult situations:
I hate to say it, I don’t want to get in the middle of [faculty-student issues], because they get very acrimonious, too, so it’s just a matter of is this person showing bias towards me, it’s they’re also destroying my life and this is blah, blah, blah. And if I can avoid being in the middle of that, I want to be. ∼Dr. Pepper
While used to intervene with student-faculty interactions, the mediator hat required the GPDs to develop interventions to improve fractured relationships. The GPDs often did not wear the mediator hat enthusiastically, as these interventions could cause contention with faculty peers or displace students from research groups.
Change maker
“I did it because it was important and no one else was.” As Hope reflected, they had an opportunity as GPD to put on what we defined as a change maker hat and use their position of power to change policy or support students within the program. Hope and April wore this hat to organize events for students, advocate for them within the institution, develop community or respond to local, national, and international situations. As one example, in the summer of 2020, Hope took action to create a safe space for their students following the death of George Floyd and subsequent protests:
In the case of George Floyd, we were monitoring the situation, talking about what to do, and in the end, what we decided to do was to have a town hall, and we invited all of the community, undergrads, grads, faculty, staff, everyone was invited to a town hall on Zoom. That was back when the pandemic was not good, so we did Zoom. And we had hundreds of people come. And I was, sadly, I was the host of this, the Zoom meeting, and so[…] I put together an agenda with different speakers and representatives from different groups, like undergrad groups, grad groups, staff, faculty, representative. And we let those people speak. And then we basically had a Q&A and the chat was opened, and we just tried to handle the Q&A […] And we basically wanted to just let people just talk and air it out and just share their anger and frustration.
In Hope’s experiences making change, they, along with other GPDs, highlighted instances of feeling restricted on what changes they could make due to institutional and personal limitations. Both Hope and April shared multiple examples of showing support to students and creating spaces for students during and following significant events external to the institution.
A few GPDs in this study held multiple administrative roles simultaneously. Hope leveraged both of their roles, as GPD and equity officer of their program, to take action toward making their department more inclusive:
And then as equity officer, my job is to do whatever is necessary to make my department more inclusive and more representative of the general population, with respect to gender, underrepresented genders, and also with respect to race and ethnicity, and also in other ways, in thinking about international students or students from families where they don’t have any PhD students, or I mean PhD degree holders. And then whenever something happens in the department that might be viewed as discriminatory or not proper, the department leadership might call on me for advice or counsel or to help navigate the situation.
For Hope and April, the change maker hat was worn to respond to situations their students faced and to enable students to take action to support one another (e.g. development of student organizations, events).
Dr. Pepper, Spring, and Maple wore the change maker hat less often and discussed the use of this hat in an aspirational sense, seeing possibilities for affecting change in their program. Dr. Pepper discussed designing a class for new graduate students to support them during the transition into graduate school:
I’ll say, when I took this [GPD role] over, there were certain things that I thought, ‘Oh, this is what I would like to put into place. These are things I’d like to accomplish while I'm here.’ And so, I feel like I’ve done some of that, some of that not as well as I’d like, but those were sort of seeing things from the faculty side and here’s things that I think could be improved. For instance, we have a course for new PhD students that was not in place before this, so I’ve started running that as sort of a, “Here’s what life is like as a PhD student,” kind of introduction for them, that I think will be helpful.
Maple discussed providing extensions on program deadlines for students, while Spring spoke about improving advising for students, financial aid, and supporting different identity groups. The change maker hat captured GPDs’ perceptions of the role beyond day-to-day tasks and student support. GPDs noticed, and in many cases acted on, opportunities to leverage their power to better support the graduate students in their programs.
Discussion and implications
This work addresses the shortage of literature on the experiences of GPDs and provides a clear definition of the role and how it is enacted through multiple hats. Synthesizing across our participants, we define the GPD role as:
The individual who serves as the departmental graduate programmatic lead, addressing administrative needs, guiding students on their pathways, supporting students in times of need, and working to create change.
This definition was embodied by GPDs when they wore six different hats: administrator, guide, confidant, delegator, mediator, and change maker. The administrator and guide hats align with tasks discussed in previous work (Gunnison, 2025; Wiener and Peterson, 2019), while confidant, delegator, mediator, and change maker are novel findings. As another novel contribution to graduate education literature, this is the first explicit operationalization of the role of GPD from the perspective of GPDs, and it centers the ways GPDs actively shape programs and experiences.
Alongside previous literature, our results create clarity around the GPD role (Gunnison, 2025; Wiener and Peterson, 2019; Ortega, 2003). This description can be used by faculty entering and operating in this role to create boundaries and advocate for resources to support the successful enactment of the GPD role. In addition, the variation in participants’ responses illustrates ways to adapt the GPD role in different institutional contexts and departmental structures (Bahnson et al., 2023). Faculty who interface with GPDs in their program can use this definition to advocate for resources and actions that support and shape research, practice, and policy. For students, a clear understanding of this role helps to align expectations of what GPDs can do to support them as they progress in their program and through difficult situations (Coley and Thomas, 2023). By defining this role, professional development for faculty can move beyond simplified training approaches to ones that develop the knowledge, skills, and abilities of GPDs (Ortega, 2003; Wiener and Peterson, 2019). Finally, clarity around the GPD role helps to position these leaders within administrative structures and create guidance for graduate school deans on how to best work with these leaders (McAlpine et al., 2024).
Returning to one of our broader goals for this study – defining the role to help foster change (Lee et al., 2024; Posselt, 2020) – participants noted that they either attempted or aspired to implement change. The participants who wore the change maker hat saw opportunities to create and implement change, as well as opportunities to move beyond the examples presented. By articulating the bounds of the GPD role, the change levers that GPDs have access to becomes clearer. The aspirational desires of these GPDs to make change as part of their role represents capital that could be leveraged to address the long-standing challenges in graduate education (Posselt, 2020). By making the actions and goals of GPDs explicit, we also make their power explicit. The power held by GPDs requires researchers and administrators to move toward models that position GPDs as central to change and innovation. This work moves toward that outcome by naming roles displayed in the GPDs’ actions and highlighting their individual goals within their role to promote change in their departments or institutions.
The implications of this research benefit the graduate education research community. In this study, we show GPDs’ contributions in their departments and institutions, provide categories that encapsulate the actions required within the GPD role, and reveal the potential levers for change GPDs have access to via the hats they wear. Graduate education researchers and scholars can expand on this research to better understand the GPD role and support GPDs in supporting graduate students. The results of this work set the stage for collaborations and initiatives for change in graduate programs. To further support GPDs and change work, future research could explore how the different hats interact with each other to shape action and inaction. In addition, future work can move past the task-based approaches outlined here to include the emotional work and lived experiences of GPDs. The exploration of GPD roles should extend beyond engineering and USA contexts to capture how disciplinary and cultural norms create different hats and enactments. Finally, doing the work of connecting these hats to leadership training can support necessary changes to improve graduate education.
Conclusions
This study characterized how faculty enact roles for their specific graduate programs (i.e. the role of GPD). Analysis of interviews with seven GPDs from diverse graduate programs in the USA revealed six “hats” that GPDs wear within their work: administrator, guide, mediator, delegator, confidant, and change maker. The identification of these hats provides a foundation for:
faculty to better conceptualize the role;
administrators to consider how they support faculty training and transition to this role; and
scholars to further examine levers for change within graduate education.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Mais Kayyali and Derrick J. Satterfield for their help with data collection on this project. The authors also thank the participants for their openness in the data collection process. This research is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) [under awards #2147744 and #2521259]. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.
