I am so happy to be participating in the GMAS blog’s first guest speaker series. For my first blog, I wanted to answer a question that gets asked a lot. Why is “Discipline” mandatory in GMAS, and how specific do I need to be (can I choose “Other”)?

The quick answer is, the discipline is mandatory because it is a CRITICAL piece of data that is used in reporting. This data is mainly used for the Higher Education Research and Development Survey (HERD) run by NSF, which is the primary source of information on R&D expenditures at U.S. colleges and universities. This is an annual report. The complicated survey is broken down across all academic fields. When selecting a discipline, it should be based on the nature of the work being proposed, which will not necessarily match the department discipline. Choosing “Other”, or choosing the incorrect discipline requires additional mapping to be done to properly account for the project in the survey. 

For more information about the HERD Survey go here https://nsf.gov/statistics/srvyherd/#sd.  For more information or questions about the discipline codes, please feel free to email me at michael_toon@harvard.edu.