Professional Development and Leadership

 Each term the Graduate Studies Office offers a variety of training sessions on teaching, research, and career development that students from many different departments attend. The new program will formalize the process of giving students credit for coming to these workshops and will recognize students’ efforts to develop their skills and prepare for their future careers.

 Doctoral students participating in the professional development program will earn credit hours toward one course during the time they are working toward their PhD. The credit will appear on students’ transcripts under the label Professional Development. Workshops will be divided into core sessions, such as sessions on ethics, writing, presenting, mentoring, leadership, and time management, and elective sessions, divided into sessions on research, teaching, and career exploration.

 Sessions that would fall under the elective category of research include sessions on lab management, grants and funding opportunities, science proposals, and patents. Elective sessions that would be categorized as teaching, could include a teaching series led by the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL), sessions on syllabus design, workshops on being a TA, and sessions on laboratory design. Sessions that focus on career exploration would include those on academic and non-academic job searches, sessions on writing CVs and resumes, and sessions in which alumni discuss their career paths.