Getting up to speed for grad school: the Competitive Edge Summer Bridge program for incoming PhD students at the University of California, Merced

The shift from undergraduate to graduate studies demands not just academic excellence, but also new ways of thinking, different strategies for organization, and fresh support systems, constituting a "hidden curriculum" of unwritten rules and expectations that often goes unexplained. Since 2016, the Graduate Division at UC Merced along with individual graduate programs has developed the Competitive Edge Summer Bridge program which aims to address these issues, particularly for first-generation, Hispanic, and other underrepresented students. Over six weeks before the first semester begins, PhD students participate in professional development workshops and cohort-building activities, while starting research with a potential advisor and receiving a stipend. Faculty- and staff-led workshops for physics students include fellowship proposal writing, citation management, following the literature, mentor maps, scientific visualization and communication, critical thinking and ethics, peer mentoring, work/life balance, advisor-advisee relationships, introduction to Python and scientific computing, and shared instrumentation training. Longitudinal data demonstrate effectiveness, with program participants showing higher retention and on-time completion rates. They report greater confidence in navigating graduate school, and feel better prepared for graduate studies, with particularly strong gains in cohort-building and academic networking. Link: http://ucm.edu/summerbridge