GradHacker is a collaborative blog and bootcamp program that spans universities and programs. It is written by graduate students from a variety of universities, departments, and stages in their careers and for the entire range of graduate and professional students. We are dedicated to creating a community of grads who can benefit from hearing the stories, tips, and challenges of others who are experiencing the same things. The topics that we will tackle are just as varied as the individuals who are writing them, and while the original idea for this spawned from the goal of teaching other grads about technology to ease their lives and help with networking, we want to expand the idea of ‘hacking’ to all aspects of grad life.

Categories that we address include, but are not limited to discussions of professional tasks, reviews of software/hardware, pedagogical challenges and solutions, wellness related topics, family and personal issues, and productivity.

While the idea for the GradHacker website did come from a bootcamp that was first run by Michigan State University’s Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative, we were inspired by ProfHacker and continue to use them as the model. Without their original articles on hacking academic life, we would never have been able to create our own bootcamp focusing on graduate scholars. We are grateful to them for their articles which have aided us in our careers. Our hope is that we can use what we have learned from them and directly apply it to graduate lives. We stole, with permission, a lot of our design and policy information from Play the Past. Also, a major thanks to Ethan Watrall and everyone at MATRIX for supporting the team throughout this process. Cheers!