Graduate Research Assistantships

Graduate research assistantships (GRAs) are typically assigned to a particular professor or project within your discipline. Responsibilities will vary among GRAs and therefore should be explained and clarified on an individual basis. While some GRAs are awarded within a department, others are funded by grants awarded to an individual faculty member or group of faculty members. In some fields, grants, and/or faculty members, the work that a graduate research assistant does for the grant may be the same as the work done for a thesis or dissertation. Other times, the work done for the grant may be separate from the thesis or dissertation.  

For GRAs, it is important for mentors and graduate students to have conversations early on about who or what “owns” the information, how it can or cannot be published, how the work will be credited or not, and how discussions will proceed about these topics moving forward. Regardless, as part of employment, GRAs gain valuable training that helps to develop their research skills.