A blog created last year by MSU graduate students about the ups and downs of graduate student life recently has partnered with news publication Inside Higher Education.
The blog, GradHacker.org, officially began publishing on the Inside Higher Education website in December 2011 and now averages between 3,000-4,000 unique hits per day, said graduate student and GradHacker co-editor Katy Meyers.
“The blog is a digital roundtable for graduate students to discuss problems and solutions to grad life in general, both academic and personal,” Meyers said.
The blog covers topics ranging from online teaching to the dating scene in graduate school.
Meyers and graduate student Alex Galarza, the other co-editor of GradHacker, got the inspiration for the blog after holding a technology boot camp with some students to teach various digital skills and resources that could be useful to graduate students.
It officially launched in June 2011.
“We created the blog as a way to kind of continue this discussion we had about hacking grad school — about finding ways to make grad life easier through technology and kind of through community discussion,” she said.
Inside Higher Education editor Scott Jaschik said GradHacker is the only blog featured on the publication’s website run exclusively by graduate students. Jaschik said his goal with the partnership was to expand the blog to a broader audience because he thought the subject matter appealed to students everywhere.
GradHacker now has eight regular authors from schools across the country who produce content for the blog along with random guest authors, Meyers said.
Both Galarza and Meyers feel GradHacker fills a vacancy in an untapped market for graduate students.
“We really felt that there was definitely a niche to be carved out for people who aren’t professors yet,” Galarza said.
He said eventually he hopes to expand the scope of the blog to include more content related to medical and law students. Currently the authors are primarily in the humanities and social science fields.
“We always envisioned this as a space (for students) rather than a production of text,” he said.
Neither Meyers nor Galarza had any clue when they started the blog last summer that it would grow in magnitude to what it is today.
“There’s a broader feeling of getting noticed, not just paying attention to how many hits we’re getting a day,” Galarza said on being published on Inside Higher Education.
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