Professional Development

I am a bit obsessed with professional development :). I love learning new professional development skills myself, and I love helping other people learn new skills even more. So I am regularly putting together professional development workshops, I teach a professional development class for graduate students, and I am the Director of the Education and Professional Development Core for DE INBRE (an NIH funded multi-institutional consortium aimed at increasing and diversifying the DE biomedical workforce). I am also a trained facilitator for the Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research.

Select Professional Development Activities

• I co-authored a published paper titled "Common academic experiences no one talks about: Repeated rejection, impostor syndrome, and burnout. PDF.

• I gave two talks for Wiley, the publishing company, about academic burnout. Recording 1, Recording 2.

• I was a guest on the "Dear Grad Student" podcast for an episode about coping with academic rejection. Recording.

• I have given lots of workshops about impostor syndrome. Example slides.

Professional Development Class

• I strongly believe that graduate programs and faculty members in that program should formally teach graduate students the "soft skills" needed to be successful, rather than assuming they will pick things up along the way. For this reason, I spearheaded an effort to create a new professional development class in my department for PhD students, and I designed the class from the ground up.

• You can read a copy of the class syllabus here.

• You can learn more about the content I cover in class via this ridiculously long twitter thread about every class I taught for a full semester.

• I also developed a resources document for that class, which you can access here. FYI that a small subset of the materials are only accessible to UD students (e.g., job materials from people who agreed for the materials to be shared at UD).