Committees from the American Political Science Association (APSA) on the status of graduate students in political science conducted digital surveys in 2018, 2020, and 2022. Distributed using listservs from APSA, the surveys asked about a range of realities facing graduate students including employment opportunities, industry or academic support, and overall well-being. Analysis of the data pre-, during-, and post-pandemic revealed high anxiety in 2018 as part of students’ experience looking for jobs. By 2020 and 2022, anxiety worsened, such that the well-being of graduate students in political science should be addressed. We recommend a change in the structure of graduate academic programs to include stronger institutional support and an emphasis on alternative paths for work that does not entail teaching at an academic institution.

Metamaterial transmission lines can be realized as a combination of right- and left-handed transmission line (TL) sections exhibiting positive and negative dispersion. This approach gives additional degrees of freedom for improving the performance of microwave devices. Artificial right- and left-handed sections, which are based on lumped-element unit cells consisting of inductance and capacitances (LC-cells), are used. This makes it possible to decrease dimensions of the devices drastically. Furthermore, using variable capacitors in LC-cells allows designing tunable devices. This paper presents the results of design, numerical simulation, and experimental investigation of a tunable rat-race ring and free-of-spurious response dual-band filter manufactured as integrated ceramic multilayer circuits based on low-temperature co-fired ceramics. Commercial semiconductor varactors have been used as tunable components.

A dry etch process based on Cl2/SF6 has been developed to selectively remove GaN over AlGaN for the fabrication of recessed gate GaN/AlGaN HEMTs. Using this etching process recessed and non-recessed FETs were fabricated side by side on the same wafer to provide a fair comparision of data. Recessed gate FETs with a gatelength of 0.15μm show cutoff frequencies of 83 and more than 200 GHz for fT and fmax, respectively. Furthermore, gate-drain breakdown as high as 84V has been obtained which is more than twice as much compared to their non-recessed counterparts.