Graduate School Exit Surveys

The Virginia Tech Graduate School Exit Survey is distributed to graduating Master's and Doctoral students every semester. This survey provides the Graduate School with insight into the full trajectory of the graduate student experience  from the barriers students faced along the way and how funding shaped their path, to the quality of advising they received and how prepared they feel stepping into whatever comes next. The information graduates share allows the Graduate School to make real, focused improvements to the holistic graduate student experience at Virginia Tech.

We understand completing surveys can be cumbersome and time consuming. We want to assure graduates that we use the data we collect. Recently, the Graduate School has used results from prior surveys to better understand graduate students' sense of timeliness in completing their degree and the barriers they faced along the way. These barriers have included personal responsibilities, professional responsibilities, course availability, and funding. For 2025-26, we have expanded the response options for this question to reflect what students have told us  adding categories such as advisor-related issues, health and personal challenges, research barriers, degree program structure, and academic policy issues, just to name a few. Understanding the barriers graduate students face allows us to address them directly and work to reduce them as much as possible.

Other projects have included: understanding the motivation of students who complete a graduate certificate and the impact of completing a certificate on various student outcomes, understanding which services provided by the graduate school are the most useful and which may be phased out, examining trends in career paths for graduate students, and enhancing training for advisors and mentors.

To explore the results of the exit survey, use the menu on the right.