What are Academic Subreddits Talking About?: A Comparative Analysis of r/academia and r/gradschool

Graduate school and academia can often be challenging and hard to navigate. This work explores how people are using Reddit to reach out to others in academic subreddits to talk about issues one might face in their academic journey. We also explore how such discussion differs between subreddits by comparing two popularly used academic subreddits: r/gradschool and r/academia. For each subreddit, we investigated 300 posts and 500 comments. Using topic modelling, we identify and distinguish the main emergent types of posts and comments we find in these two subreddits. We find that posts in r/academia center more on the challenging aspects of academia such as plagiarism, working in academia, and mental health, whereas r/gradschool posts deal with more generic issues on graduate school life. However, we find that the way the community reacts and provides support via comments is similar in both subreddits, mostly by providing moral support and solidarity.