  Physics graduate studies are substantial efforts on the part of individual
students, departments, and institutions of higher education. Understanding the
factors that lead to student success and attrition is crucial for improving
these programs. One factor that has recently started to be investigated is the
broadly defined students' experiences related to support structures. The
Aspects of Student Experience Scale (ASES), a Likert-style survey, was
developed by researchers to do just that. In this study, we leverage the
network approach for Likert-style surveys (NALS) methodology to provide a
unique interpretation of responses to the ASES instrument for well-defined
demographic groups. We confirm the validity of our findings by studying the
stability of the NALS themes and investigating how they are expressed within
demographic-based networks. We find that for all four themes in the original
ASES study, certain thematic trends capturing students' experiences vary across
the demographic-based networks in meaningful ways. We also reveal that for some
demographic groups, there is an interesting interplay between, and mixing of,
the original themes. Finally, our study showcases how NALS can be applied to
other Likert-style datasets.
