Investigating the Borderlands of Historically Minoritized Graduate Students in Chemistry

My dissertation consists of three, interrelated papers that provided insight into the professional development of historically minoritized (hereafter, HM) graduate students within the discipline of chemistry. There was one overarching theoretical framework that situated the three papers together, but each paper has its own appropriate theoretical constructs and methodological organizations. The main data sources for this project consisted of 10 interviews with chemistry administration, staff, and faculty, 6 interviews with HM chemistry graduate students, 7 documents that are publicly available, and 55 assortments of researcher notes and reflections. The guiding question in the introduction described the overarching objectives of the study and was operationalized into specific research questions for each paper. To inform the study objectives, I asked the following guiding question:

How do the structures of the chemistry graduate program shape how HM graduate students learn to become chemistry professionals?