Conference: Predoctoral Summer Institute

The Predoctoral Summer Institute (PSI) has four overarching practical objectives: providing accessible and engaging overviews of the approach and methods of social science; encouraging participants to conduct research and envision themselves as researchers; demystifying the processes of applying to graduate programs and pursuing a graduate degree; and elucidating the career paths open to graduates of doctoral programs. In pursuing these practical objectives, PSI aims to accomplish two broader goals: empowering cohorts of participants to advance innovative research in new sites, using new methods, developing new theories, and generating actionable findings; and enhancing the training and perspectives of the student population in social science graduate education, thereby contributing to creating a more globally competitive STEM workforce.

The Predoctoral Summer Institute (PSI) supports student participants to successfully apply to graduate school and provides them with the tools to excel in their graduate programs. The Institute thus contributes to increasing the pool of students applying to graduate programs, thereby fostering intellectual progress and a globally competitive STEM workforce.

The systematic evaluation of the program allows advances in knowledge about key barriers to graduate education, the development of strategies and best practices for supporting students, and for designing and scaling such initiatives across institutions, regions, and disciplines. This knowledge, in turn, will form a robust foundation for the development of evidence-led interventions.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.