The relevance of the communication graduate student association
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The evidence concerning the various pressures faced by graduate students can, in itself, be overwhelming. At the National Communication Association annual convention in Dallas, a group of graduate student leaders from across the country held a panel entitled The Relevance of the Communication Graduate Student Association, where we shared many of the personal and professional issues faced by our departments’ respective programs. In reality, such organizations are a microcosm of larger, institutional-level difficulties that graduate students may or may not realize directly affect their everyday lives. While we bicker and gripe about our peers and colleagues who refuse to attend organizational meetings, our student representatives at the institutional level from disciplines like biology and agriculture are attempting to reconcile massive amounts of funding and fee allocation problems that ultimately dictate how we exist as students in the future. Although we as communication professionals are uniquely positioned to take part in these reforms, we often fail to integrate ourselves in these situations due to the constraints placed upon us by our respective circumstances. Herein lies the “wicked problem” (Rittel & Weber, 1973): graduate students in communication need administrative experience through increasing involvement at higher levels of institutional functioning so that the discipline can flourish, yet the lack of resources available to these same graduate students disincentives this extracurricular involvement.