DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION

have like, worked with PT students to understand their feelings and their emotions.” Therefore, support from peers, faculty, and graduate enrollment professionals were important to the overall experience for racially minoritized DPT students. The importance of peer support was also echoed by Danielle, whose program provided students with an academic coaching group: “My group is like one of the best groups I know. We support each other as much as we can. If you tell us you need help with something, we’ll help.” Additionally, participants described the importance of having support from faculty. Lauren decided to take a leave of absence of one year when in the program. During that time, she described how faculty reached out to her, and “I couldn’t have felt more supported by them and even in the year that I had to take off. But I did have like, like faculty always reached out to me and, you know, asked how I was doing, how I was studying.” Additionally, Nicole described how the responsiveness of faculty helped with her overall experience and academic success: “Whatever questions I have are [answered] within a timely manner… has truly been I mean honestly awesome, especially because there’s so many of us…just having that, you know quick response for me is something that I love.”

While peer support was important for participants in their academic success, this was only a part of participants’ overall relationship with their peers. Relationships with peers were also characterized by the racial identities of participants. Participants in this study described a difficulty in connecting beyond academics with their White peers. For example, Amanda describes how “my academic group is a lot of White students…but on a deeper level I don’t try having conversations…there’s nothing for us to talk about. It’s not a natural conversation.” Additionally, participants describe facing racial microaggression with White peers. Again, Amanda describes her interactions with her White peers as, “I can see that you look intimidated while talking to me and a part of me that kind of bothers me because it’s like I’m not trying to be intimidating and then two is like I only feel like you’re intimidated because I’m a Black woman.” Julia also described instances of racial microaggression with her peers at the beginning of the program when “one of my classmates, just offhandedly, like ask if I was related to this Asian faculty member.” Related to participants’ difficulties of connecting with their White peers on a deeper level was the experience of connecting with those who looked like them, or were also students of color. Leo described the social connections among his peers, “It feels like we split between the people of color versus the White people, which like I think at least from my experience, a lot of times we’re just gonna go towards the people who look like us.”

Finally, participants described the importance of representation among faculty and staff of their DPT programs. Nicole’s experiences of meeting her faculty on the first day of the program is reflective of the importance of faculty and staff representation for students of color in DPT programs: “I immediately texted my mom and dad and I was like, ‘Mom, there’s a professor who looks just like me’... And that, to me, was so cool because I’ve never had that”. More importantly, Nicole perceived that having a faculty of the same racial identity made it easier for her because “if I had a question that maybe had to do with my race, I could go to you. It would be a more fluent conversation than if I were to go to someone else.”

The findings of this study suggest that racial identity formed the core of participants’ experiences as racially minoritized DPT students enrolled in health profession programs. These experiences inform how racially minoritized DPT students perceive the nature of support that is available to them as students. They also inform how DPT and other health profession programs can structure support available to students that can influence their academic success, and overall student experience.

Discussion

The findings of this study suggest that the experiences of racially minoritized DPT students align with existing studies on the experiences of racially minoritized students enrolled in other graduate programs. Alignment of such experiences include the need for family and peer support and the nature of relationships with peers. The experiences described by participants in this study also suggest that while racially minoritized graduate students generally have similar experiences influenced by their