Highlights Podcast: January 2020
January 21, 2020
Simon Goodacre | Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
This semester, we are going to try something new with the Highlights Podcast. We want the podcast to be a tool for the GSAS office to communicate directly with students, so we are splitting it into two different series: the Highlights Podcast, which will concentrate on announcements and student resources from our office, and the Spotlight series, which will focus on interviews with students and alumni in various fields. The Highlights podcast will be published twice a semester, and the Spotlight Podcast will be published throughout the year.
In this episode of the new Highlights podcast, we will focus on professional development opportunities. You will hear from Alyssa Stasberg Canelli, the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, and Marika McCann from the Center for Career and Professional Development.
Index
1:27—Alyssa Stalsberg Canelli discusses the Connected PhD
7:44—Sue Levine introduces the Center for Career and Professional Development
9:05—Alyssa Stalsberg Canelli discusses National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity
13:27—Marika McCann introduces Handshake
Transcript
Simon:
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Highlights Podcast. I am Simon Goodacre, the Associate Director of Communications and Marketing at GSAS, and I hope you all enjoyed the holiday season and were able to get some well-deserved rest. We're going to try something a little bit different with the podcast this semester because we want the podcast to be a tool for the GSAS office to communicate directly with students. With that in mind, we're splitting the podcasts into two different series: the Highlights Podcast, which will concentrate on announcements and student resources from our office, and the Spotlight Series, which will focus on interviews with students and alumni in various fields.
The Highlights Podcast will be published twice a semester and the spotlight podcast will be published throughout the year. In this episode of the new Highlights Podcast, we will focus on professional development opportunities. You will hear from Alyssa Stalsberg Canelli, the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, and Sue Levine and Marika McCann from the Center for Career and Professional Development. Alyssa will discuss the Connected PhD and the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity, and Sue and Marika will discuss some resources
available from their office. So thank you for joining us and I bring you Alyssa Stalsberg Canelli.
Welcome back to the podcast, Alyssa. Great to have you. I wanted to talk to you today about the Connected PhD. We’ve launched it at the beginning of this academic cycle and we had a few early applications and so forth, but I wanted to check in with you about where we are and how the project is doing. But first of all, could I ask for folks who are still not familiar, what is the Connected PhD and what are we trying to achieve with it?
Alyssa:
Sure. And it's great to be back here with you, Simon. So the Connected PhD is our new Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant. It's a four year program and the goal is to enrich professional development opportunities for doctoral students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences here at Brandeis. The point of the program is to develop graduate courses and course modules that integrate scholarly creativity with professional development opportunities, to give faculty members professional development and training to support and mentor and advise graduate
students into diverse career pathways, to create opportunities for students to learn a broad range of competencies necessary to succeed in both academic and nonacademic careers, and to really develop new ways of balancing student academic and work responsibilities including during the summer months.
So fundamentally, what we're looking to do with this grant is to equip graduate students with the ability to get new experiences and develop new skills that will enable them to be able to pursue a variety of career pathways. We know that our alums are in a variety of different and various successful fields. One of the things that we're following the national conversation in general around the career outcomes and career placements of PhDs.
Simon:
And so this program, there are projects that can be led by faculty and by students for this. Could you give me an example or two of the kinds of student projects that might be funded?
Alyssa:
So one of the most prominent things that we expect to happen out of this grant is that students will be able to use their summers in a particular way, and in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, there's a wide range of funding opportunities in the summer. There are some programs that have little to no summer funding and there are some programs that have substantial summer
funding, but the point of this grant is to equalize that playing field so that students can apply for grants so they can have experiences that they can take an unpaid internship at a cultural institution for instance. Or collaborate and consult with a nonprofit during the summer and that the grant can support their living expenses, can support any skills development necessary to have that experience so that there's a way in which we can use those summers that can move the student forward, both in terms of their own research and degree requirements, but also in terms of their own professional development goals.
Simon:
And how much funding is available for a student project?
Alyssa:
Currently, we have a cap of up to $6,000 and that number is really thinking about a summer project, so the amount that would be required to fund a student's living expenses throughout the summer so that they could actually focus full time on a particular skill development or experience.
Simon:
And when can students apply for the Connected PhD?
Alyssa:
Our next deadline will be late to mid-March. We will be announcing that shortly. And one of the things that we are thinking about actually is having some rolling application processes for that. So as smaller things come up, for instance, there are a couple of situations in which students have come to us to talk about, you know, is this something possible to fund through the connected PhD in which there's like a four week skill development lab or something at the University of Michigan that they want to attend but it may not fall within our biannual proposal process. So we're developing a process at least for the student proposals to do a rolling application.
Simon:
And what application tips would you provide?
Alyssa:
So my biggest tip is that you need to come meet with us to talk about your ideas. One of the things we have discovered is that as to be expected, graduate students in humanistic social sciences are really focused on their research, their research agenda, what they want to accomplish with their research, their scholarly output, and that's the number one priority. And while we acknowledge that that is a very important thing in there, we acknowledge that professional development can be aligned with those research goals, this grant is not supposed to fund pure research. It's really about framing. It's about the professional development experience, acquiring new skills and ways in which to engage with the world.
Simon:
And who should students get in touch with to learn more about the Connected PhD?
Alyssa:
You can obviously email me for a meeting, although my schedule tends to get pretty pretty cramped in the mid semester. But, we have a team of people. It's myself, Emily Wheeler in the graduate school of arts and sciences as well, who's a senior department coordinator who's running lead on this project. We also have two graduate students, Hannah Young and Sean Beebe from the history department, and they're really working to make themselves accessible, to sit down and talk with their peers around possible ideas.
And again, I can't stress the conversation enough because it does take several conversations, I think, often for students to make the transition between their research hat and also then professional development. It has to do with rethinking things, reframing things, thinking about what possibilities are there. And one of the things that I think is something that's at a huge advantage of this process is that we actually are very open and expansive and we have actually very few limitations because we want to encourage creative thinking. We want to encourage creative collaboration. We want to encourage graduate students who are the experts at their own research field to think about how this research can facilitate professional development experiences, community collaborations, external partnerships with nonprofits, community partners and so on.
Simon:
Well, thank you, Alyssa. I'll be back with you in just a moment, but first a word from the Center for Career and Professional Development.
Sue:
Hi, this is Sue Levine. I'm the Assistant Director for Career and Professional Development at Brandeis's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and just wanted to tell you a little bit about what we can do for students and alums. We really recognize the holistic career development for graduate students, so professional development, career development, personal development kind of all intertwines and is connected. We provide opportunities for you to connect with people and
information that relates to a really a wide variety of career paths and diverse career paths, whether you are in the sciences, humanities, or social sciences. And we recognize that people may have a variety of career options, both academic and nonacademic. We also provide connections to alumni and employers who may be seeking to hire graduate students from Brandeis, specifically. And we do that through providing information on our website as alumni spotlights where you can read about the career trajectories of some of our alums, info sessions on campus, career fairs on campus, and also through our online career portal where you can find pretty much everything that you need to access from events to job postings, internship postings, and that is called Handshake, which you can find on our website.
Simon:
Okay. So I'm back with Alyssa and we're going to be talking about the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity or the NCFDD. This is an organization that Brandeis became a member of about 18 months ago. And I believe some of our students have already been taking advantage of it, so we wanted to give you an update on how that's going. But once again, Alyssa, I was wondering if you could just give us a little primer on the NCFDD and what it is that it offers to Brandeis.
Alyssa:
So the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity is an amazing opportunity for our graduate students. It's a membership that Brandeis has purchased to an outside organization to provide support and mentorship and support and development around a variety of professional development issues related to being an academic. And one of the amazing things about this membership that I don't think anyone really anticipated was the extent to which graduate students have already taken advantage of it. I actually just checked our stats this afternoon before I started to record this and we have 181 graduate student members,active members of NCFDD. Those are 181 students who have activated their membership, which comprise actually little, almost half of the active memberships that are currently held in our Brandeis membership.
So what that says to me is that there's been an incredible uptake on the part of our graduate students for this type of external support. And what the goal of the organization, as you can tell by the name is, was really to provide network support and mentoring resources to retain faculty from underrepresented groups. And that actually just kind of it grew and grew in the sense of that yes, this supports faculty from underrepresented groups, but it also supports every faculty member who is struggling to balance time management and set goals and to be productive and to move their writing along and to really think about how to navigate the politics of academia.
Simon:
Why did the university join?
Alyssa:
I think that there was a very explicit need on the part of our current tenure track faculty to have mentoring and resource and supports and the Dean of Arts and Sciences recognized that need at the time and there was a decision made to support our faculty. And because of that, again it was a side benefit, but I think it's become one of the primary benefits to support our graduate students that become an essential member. Grad students can take advantage of that. And one of the things I think that has become very clear throughout this process is the ways in which it doesn't take away from faculty advising. It doesn't take away from what's happening on Brandeis campus. It's a wonderful compliment to what's already happening.
Simon:
And you mentioned that the NCFDD offers many resources for graduate students. Could you talk about some of those and how they might be used?
Alyssa:
So this is an online network support. So really it comes in two forms. It comes through a series of webinars and a variety of different topics. So for instance, they have a core curriculum full of 10 webinars. Some of the titles are “Every Semester Needs a Plan,” “How to Align Your Time with Your Priorities,” “How to Develop a Daily Writing Practice,” “The Art of Saying ‘No.’” And one of my favorite ones, “Overcoming Academic Perfectionism” and “How to Manage Stress, Rejection and the Haters in Your Midst.” So those are examples of the type of webinars that they have.
And also, they have actually writing support, so they have 14-day writing challenges. There's a whole curriculum around dissertation writing success. There are online forums for dissertation and writing support and accountability.
Simon:
And finally, how can students access the NCFDD?
Alyssa:
So you go to www.facultydiversity.org or you can google ncfdd.org and it'll bring you up to that website. You'll have to sign in and you'll have to register and activate your Brandeis institutional account. But once you do that, you'll have access to all of the curriculum, all the webinars. You can register for the writing challenges, you can be in the chat rooms and the forums and get that kind of writing and accountability support.
Simon:
And now another word from the Center for Career and Professional Development.
Marika:
Hi, my name is Marika McCann. I'm the Assistant Director of the Center for Career and Professional Development with the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. We provide one-on-one personalized appointments for students and alums at GSAS. We can work with you on resume development and cover letter review and development as well. We can work with you through Handshake on finding a job as well as an internship and also looking at LinkedIn on how to set up a profile and use it to network with alums and employers. Another piece that we can work with you on is branding, being able to talk about who you are and what you want for your career when speaking with employers as well as mock interviews and finally salary negotiation.
On our website for GSAS career development, you can find career tips. We urge you to look into Handshake. Everyone with a Brandeis email can utilize Handshake. It's our one stop shop Career service platform. The first thing I urge you to do is to make an appointment with us, go to the career center and appointments and you can meet with a team member form GSAS. You can create a profile, find events around campus, off campus, and also virtually and also view up to date job and internship postings. Also, check your email for our monthly career communicator email that will be out soon.
Simon:
Well, thank you for joining us for this episode of the podcast. Please, if you have any suggestions, get in touch with me at sgoodacre@brandeis.edu and I hope you'll join us next time on the Highlights Podcast.