AbstractHigher education institutions have long played a key role in solving society's most pressing problems. However, as the scale and complexity of socio‐environmental problems has grown, there has been a renewed debate about the role that academic institutions should play in developing solutions and how institutional structures should be redesigned to encourage greater interdisciplinarity. In the following pages, we present a graduate student perspective on this debate. Specifically, we identify challenges facing interdisciplinary graduate student researchers and present a series of recommendations for how institutions can better prepare them to become the next generation of leaders in interdisciplinary, action‐oriented research focused on solving socio‐environmental problems.