"A River of Tears Is a Valid Answer?": Social Science Graduate Students' Experiences Learning Programming for Research

Computing is a key skill needed in today's increasingly digital world. However, for novice learners outside of computer science programs, the experience of learning to program can elicit "a river of tears,"as a graduate student provocatively reported in our recent interview study. Seventeen graduate students from the social sciences participated in semi-structured interviews focused on how they acquire programming skills, the barriers they face, and the resources they wish they could access. Through data-driven thematic analysis, we found common values underlying social science graduate students' desired learning supports including availability, transferability, and connection. Future learning strategies and supports to ameliorate social science graduate students' experiences could focus on resolving tensions between values, minimizing the wide disparity in resources among social science graduate students, and increasing the transferability support structures and the connections between social science graduate students, peers, and instructors. This research project contributes empirical understandings of social science graduate students' experiences learning to program for their independent research.