Career Selection and Professional Skill Development Workshop Series
Saturday Workshops

Each Saturday workshop is a full day in length to facilitate discussion among students and workshop panel members, and to provide hands-on skill sessions. Morning sessions are organized as panel discussions while students spend afternoons in concurrent breakout sessions getting applied advice on specific issues associated with their professional development. Registration is required. For more information contact Rique Campa (campa@msu.edu) and Judith Stoddart (stoddart@msu.edu)

• Planning for a Sustainable Career: From Graudate Student to Professional 9/27/08
• Securing Academic Positions at Two- and Four-Year Institutions 10/25/08
• Planning, Managing and Funding the Research Project 4/5/09

Dr. Peter Berg (Professor, Labor and Industrial Relations)
Dr. Roger Baldwin (Professor)

Dr. Diane Ebert-May (Professor, Plant Biology)
Dr. Terry May (Faculty Conflict of Interest Information Officer,The Graduate School & Office of the Vice President for Research & Graduate Studies)
Justus Nieland (Associate Professor, Department of English)
Sarah Wohlford (Attorney, Honigman Miller Schwartz and Cohn)
James Zacks (Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology)
Rose Zacks (Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology)

Doctoral programs are the first stage in a long professional career; preparing for that career requires not just disciplinary training, but the development of a range of skills necessary to adapt to professional and personal changes. The workshop will help you to identify those skills and to learn how and where to acquire them. How do you achieve a workable balance between your personal and professional life? How do working professionals deal productively with setbacks, life changes, competing priorities? What kind of planning can you do now to avoid emotional, physical, and financial burnout both now and in the long term? What does it take to develop a “sustainable” career in graduate school and beyond?

Presenters at this workshop will discuss and answer questions on what current research reveals about developing a productive long-term career within and outside the academy. The morning session will feature two prominent researchers who will present the results of their studies on work-life balance and on faculty at mid-career, and who will translate those results into planning ideas you can use now. In addition, a panel of two-career couples will talk candidly about the choices they have made in conducting job searches, considering career choices and decisions, and balancing family and career. The afternoon breakout sessions will feature financial planners who will talk about such issues as paying for graduate school, balancing students loans, budgeting, negotiating starting salaries, paying off loans while starting a new position. Students will leave these sessions with a framework for their own financial plan.

This workshop is aimed at post docs and at doctoral students at all levels of their programs, from those just beginning their coursework, to those starting on their job searches and making the transition from graduate student to a new career.

Dr. Michael Nealon (Lansing Community College)
Dr. Michael Stob (Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Calvin College)
Dr. Fred Antczak (Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Grand Valley State University)
Dr. Karen Klomparens (Dean and Associate Provost, The Graduate School, Michigan State University)

What type of academic position would you like to have after completing your degree? Do you want to teach, do research, develop and conduct outreach programs, or a little of each? What kinds of institutions best fit your interests? What are the expectations for applicants at different kinds of institutions, and what are the potential career trajectories?

This workshop will focus on academic cultures at a variety of institutions: community colleges, liberal art colleges, colleges with religious affiliations, universities with historically specialized missions, and research extensive universities. What are the expectations at these institutions, from the job interview to the tenure process? Panel members in the morning session will include administrators and faculty members from a variety of institutions who will talk about the process of applying and interviewing for academic positions, expectations for new faculty, and advancement opportunities and the tenure and promotion process.

The afternoon breakout sessions will focus on information related to specific disciplines. Workshop participants will have the opportunity to decipher job ads and to participate in mock interviews for positions in the humanities, social sciences, education, and natural sciences at two- and four-year institutions. Interviewers will be faculty from a variety of institutions. Participants will interact with the interview panels to discuss the strengths of candidates, what to do and what not to do in various types of interviews, and what to do to make your application more competitive.

Securing Academic Positions at Two- and Four-Year Institutions

Planning, writing, and getting funding for a research idea as a doctoral student, new postdoc or new faculty member can be a daunting task. How do you manage a research project from proposal to completion, and how does the process vary by discipline? This workshop will focus on how to break down the various components and tasks of a research project, identify strategies for organization and project management, and understand the process of identifying and securing funding. Participants will develop their own project plan throughout the course of the workshop, assisted by presentations and working sessions with faculty familiar with the process as both researchers and agency grant reviewers, as well as with experts on grants databases. Information will be applicable to a range of research projects (a specific grant, a publication, a thesis or dissertation); participants should come either with an idea for a project they would like to do or with the outline of a project already in progress.

In the morning plenary, faculty, advanced graduate students and postdocs will share their experience with managing a research project, including "packaging" the research proposal to meet requirements of funding sources, the components of a budget, supervising and evaluating teams, and creating the project report. In the morning breakout sessions, facilitators will help participants break down their own research projects and discuss key issues related to the stage of project development.

In the afternoon breakouts, specialists from the library will demonstrate grants databases most relevant to the Social Science, Humanities, and STEM disciplines. The afternoon plenary will show participants a proposal review in action, with a group of faculty staging a discussion of a proposal, followed by a question and answer session.