Essential Elements of Collaboration: Understanding How Chemistry Graduate Students Experience Collaboration through International Research Visits

This study explores how graduate students learn to participate in collaborative international science research. As part of an NSF-funded program, 21 graduate students participated in extended research visits to China, completing surveys before and after traveling, and participating in semistructured interviews upon returning to the U.S. These survey and interview data were qualitatively analyzed to determine how graduate student participants defined collaboration and how they positioned their own research experience in an international context. Data were coded using emergent thematic analysis via a first pass open-coding to generate a comprehensive list of descriptive codes for collaboration and then a synthesis of these codes through discussions guided by theories of situated learning in communities of practice. Findings suggest that all graduate students emphasized the importance of effective communication in collaboration. Graduate students also described collaboration as including at least one of the following elements: complementary expertise, shared goals, joint publications, and mutual learning. These findings provide insight into graduate students' experiences with collaboration, and, in turn, how to support graduate students so that they have successful international research experiences and collaborations with international colleagues.