First-year graduate courses foster inclusion

To the Editor – Recent studies have highlighted the lack of racial and ethnic diversity in geoscience1 and the failure to increase diversity of students earning geoscience PhDs in the United States for more than 40 years2. In response to this crisis, programmes are working to expand diversity through graduate recruitment efforts3. However, our discipline will not become more diverse without making our graduate programmes more inclusive and sustainable for those who enter them. As part of our inclusive practices, we, as US professors and mentors of graduate students, have built courses for first-year graduate students that seek to make transparent the tacit knowledge needed to succeed in our discipline4, sometimes called the hidden curriculum of graduate school.