Tag Archives: career pathways

Working Group: March Agenda

During our upcoming meeting of the Core Working Group, we hope to make some substantial headway in our discussions on both alumni data collection and building alumni and employee partnerships. This will be the last discussion-oriented meeting of this project. Our Town Hall event, which we’ve named Post Grad (Center): Engaging Publics with a PhD (see our January meeting report for more details), will be held on May 4. Our final committee meetings in May, June, and July will be used to draft, comment on, and edit a white paper and evaluation plan for implementing project ideas.

Here is the agenda for the upcoming meeting:

Core Working Group Meeting
March 7, 2017

Meeting Agenda:
  1. Summary of January 30th Project Directors’ Meeting
  2. Review of last week’s Steering Committee Meeting conversation
    • New alumni committee members
    • Understanding PhD Career Pathways for Program Improvement
    • Curricular review and innovations from Provost Joy Connolly
    • Planning for the May 4th event
  3. Recommendations and strategies around alumni data collection
    • Streamline communications between programs and administrative offices
    • Metrics for assessing effectiveness of future curricular changes
    • Launch of an alumni mentoring database
  4. Recommendations and strategies around partnerships
    • Best practices for connecting with external organizations
    • Launch of an employer network
  5. Graduate Career Consortium Meeting in Houston, TX, Tuesday through Friday, June 27-30, 2017

Steering Committee: February Agenda

The Project Steering Committee met yesterday afternoon. It was a very productive session and included some new alumni committee members. We will post our meeting notes in the next couple of days, but for now …

Here is the meeting agenda:

Project Steering Committee Meeting
February 27, 2017

Meeting Agenda:
  1. Introductions
  2. Report from the January 30 Project Directors Meeting
  3. Council of Graduate Schools’ PhD career pathways, Jennifer Kobrin
    (Understanding PhD Career Pathways for Program Improvement)
  4. Curricular review and innovations, Provost Joy Connolly
  5. Planning for the May 4th event

Working Group: January Report

Overview

The Core Working Group used our January meeting to make headway in planning the May 4 Town Hall event.

Event Proposal

As outlined in our grant project proposal, the May event (under the working title Town Hall Meeting on Careers for Humanists) is an opportunity to encourage discussions between faculty, students, and alumni about possible career paths for humanities PhDs.

The event was conceived as an extension of an event hosted by the Office of Career Planning and Professional Development in December 2015. That event, called “Post Grad (Center): Putting Your Graduate Skills and Training to Work,” included twenty alumni from across the humanities and social sciences. These Graduate Center alums met and networked with approximately sixty students who attended the event.

Event Planning

The title for our May 4 event will be “Post Grad (Center): Engaging Publics with a PhD.“ Building off of the December 2015 event, we will bring together university scholars and PhD professionals outside academe, Graduate Center students, faculty, and alumni for panel discussions, breakout sessions, and a keynote address. We want everyone in attendance to join in the efforts of The New PhD: A Renaissance of Public Engagement to reimagine the possibilities opened up by doctoral study in the humanities and related disciplines and to help us give shape to a new PhD for the work of the next generation.

Following coffee and registration, our morning session will be a curated panel of scholars from a range of professional backgrounds. The panel will be centered around the notion that there are countless ways from both within and outside academia to continue one’s scholarly and research interests after graduation.

Attendees will break off into two groups for lunch. Students and alumni will participate in facilitated roundtable networking. Meanwhile, faculty members and program Executive Officers will participate in a facilitated discussion around the ideas generated during our monthly project meetings. We will discuss the cross-disciplinary initiatives that we have been developing to integrate professional development for public-sphere humanities into existing curricula. The goal of the grant has been to produce concrete plans that will transform the humanities PhD to meet the labor demands of the twenty-first century—preparing students for careers outside as well as inside academe—and we hope to win the support of Graduate Center faculty in order to put these plans into action.

During the afternoon, we hope to offer an array of breakout panel sessions on a range of topics related to careers for humanists, such as public service, journalism, and NGOs. There will also be a keynote talk prior to a reception during which participants can continue to network and discuss the day’s proceedings.

Moving Forward

With a tentative agenda in place, our project leaders and committee members can begin extending targeted invitations to alumni and guest speakers.

The next project meeting will bring together the Steering Committee to discuss ideas for developing an alumni mentoring database and to continue plans for this May 4 event.

Working Group: January Agenda

Although we’re excited to continue the conversations about data that we started during our December meeting (see meeting report here), our meeting this afternoon will focus almost entirely on our May 4 event because we need to solidify our plans so that we can begin contacting prospective participants.

Core Working Group
January 17, 2017

Meeting Agenda:
  1. Plans for May 4 event: Town Hall Meeting on Careers in the Humanities
    • Event title
    • Event structure
    • Event participants, inc. potential keynote speakers
  2. May 4 event publicity and invitations