Terminal M.S. Students Who Participate in the CRA-W’s Grad Cohort Show Increased Interest in Pursuing a Ph.D.

 Terminal M.S. Students Who Participate in the CRA-W’s Grad Cohort Show Increased Interest in Pursuing a Ph.D.

Note: During the spring of 2015, 63 Terminal Masters students who had participated in the CRA-W’s annual Grad Cohort mentoring event for women graduate students responded to the following question: How interested are you in ultimately pursuing a PhD in a computing field? Respondents answered this question two weeks prior to and two weeks after Grad Cohort using the following scale: Not at all, A little, Somewhat, Quite a bit, Extremely. Sixty-eight percent of women indicated that they were at least “Somewhat” interested in pursuing a Ph.D. in a computing field prior to Grad Cohort compared to 82% of women after Grad Cohort. This 14% increase suggests that Grad Cohort may be a viable way of increasing women’s participation in computing research at the Ph.D. level.

These data are brought to you by the CRA’s Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline (CERP). CERP provides social science research and comparative evaluation for the computing community. To learn more about CERP, visit our website at https://cra.org/cerp/.