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The New PhD: A Renaissance of Public Engagement
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
A white paper for the Next Generation Humanities PhD Planning Grant

What Happened?

We were pleased to be a member of the first group of Next Generation Humanities PhD awardees and convened two committees for the project. Our meetings began in late August 2016. Each committee included faculty members, key administrators, students, and alumni. For a full list of committee members, see Appendix A-1. The smaller Core Working Group met more frequently and was tasked primarily with building faculty support for the project and stimulating collaboration between different humanities programs. The larger Project Steering Committee received updates about the Core Working Group’s activities and provided input regarding project progression and implementation. Both groups were overseen by our two project directors. The Core Working Group has met independently six times during the grant duration and has one final meeting scheduled for July; the Project Steering Committee met independently four times during the grant duration. Full meetings of both the Core Working Group and the Project Steering Committee were held twice, once each semester. Altogether, we will have held eleven committee meetings between August 2016 and July 2017. Joy Connolly, who became the Graduate Center’s (GC) provost on August 1, 2016, joined us for several of our spring semester meetings in order to strategize how best to implement changes.

Our meeting agendas were set in accordance with our project proposal and timeline. Each meeting discussion centered around one of our three planning themes: curriculum, data, and partnerships. Curricular discussions dominated our planning project and focused on issues such as career development for a wider range of careers at all stages of doctoral coursework, alternatives to the monographic dissertation, internships and other types of service for doctoral students, expanding mentorship, supporting collaborative work, and diversifying admissions. Data discussions involved reporting on the various methods used for collecting, updating, and disseminating alumni and placement information across the institution’s offices and programs. We also examined the results of an internal study conducted by the Office of Institutional Research and Effectiveness (OIRE), which has tracked 90% of GC graduates between 2003 and 2014; OIRE is currently gathering data on more recent graduates and will participate in the Council of Graduate Schools’ Understanding Career Pathways initiative as a project affiliate. Partnerships discussions were largely concerned with the integration of internships and other types of experiential learning into program curricula or student fellowships, in particular how this might be structured and funded. Following each meeting, meeting notes were distributed among committee members. The agenda and notes for each meeting were also made publically available on our project website: https://nextgenphd.commons.gc.cuny.edu/.

In addition to meeting agendas and notes, our project website also includes our project proposal and timeline, an overview of our three project planning themes, a list of all committee members, links to other Next Gen Consortium project websites, and information regarding our day-long town hall event. Our project website uses WordPress as its content management system and is hosted on the CUNY Academic Commons, an online, academic social network for the City University of New York operating under a Creative Commons license. Our website is discoverable by search engines, and we provided a direct link to it from the homepage of the Office of Career Planning and Professional Development’s (OCPPD) website.

In the spring semester, the project committees, in association with the OCPPD, organized and hosted a day-long town hall event called Post Grad (Center): Engaging Publics with a PhD. Building off a similar event piloted by the OCPPD in December 2015, this humanities-centered town hall event gave students and recent graduates the chance to meet, learn from, and network with GC alumni from a range of professional backgrounds outside of academia. For a full list of event speakers, see Appendix A-2. The day’s keynote talk by career consultant Dr. Fatimah Williams-Castro focused on making connections and networking, and Dr. Jason Pedicone provided some final thoughts for the day during a talk that highlighted the public engagement of his organization, the Paideia Institute for Humanistic Study, and its collected data focusing on the placement of Classics PhDs across employment sectors. Approximately ninety students, alumni, faculty members and administrators participated.

As part of this day-long event, the Provost, program Executive Officers (EO—the GC’s term for department chair), and key members of the Core Working Group met to discuss ideas for curricular change generated by project meetings (Appendix A-2). This meeting allowed the project directors to discuss the project with a wider audience of faculty members. During this meeting, several important points were raised. The first was the (unsurprising) reluctance of students to discuss a wider range of careers and the need to develop strategies for normalizing this type of conversation. This need for normalization can vary widely by program. For example, in theatre, music, and art history, many students actively seek to continue working in artistic practice or in curatorial roles. Indeed, some EO’s felt that our students were becoming more savvy, more aware of their career prospects. Program size can also play a role in our approach to this issue. The EO of Classics, one of our smaller programs, noted that this normalization can be easier in larger programs where individual students are less likely to feel targeted by a general message. A second point connected to admissions and the student funding structure of the GC. Most students are now fully funded, which is wonderful for these students, but this structure has also resulted in a reduction of the number of admitted students. Now, programs have less flexibility to admit students who are working professionals. These students, one EO reported, brought career diversity into the classroom. Finally, one EO highlighted the GC’s need as an institution to engage alumni on a more frequent and systematic basis.

The conversation enabled us to build consensus on several ideas for curricular change. Provost Connolly mentioned that doctoral programs across the GC have been asked to think more creatively about their curricula. The ideas from this project that met with support from this faculty audience included: developing modules on writing and presenting for non-faculty audiences, a “statistics for the humanities” course and increased connection between the humanities and social sciences, incorporating more collaborative projects into humanities coursework, and shifting the terms of the graduate teaching fellowship to offer experiences other than teaching. Lisa Rhody, deputy director of the GC Digital Initiatives, noted that some of this work was already being done through the GC Digital Initiatives and that this work could be a jumping off point for reshaping doctoral curricula. Our discussion was productive, demonstrating that faculty across humanities disciplines are concerned about their students’ career prospects and are willing to engage in creative thinking on this topic.

What Worked and What Didn’t?

Through much discussion, our Core Working Group and Project Steering Committee developed a focused, practicable, and concrete module-based course of professionalization study and training that can be integrated into existing curricula without introducing additive elements. Many of the humanities programs have introduction to graduate studies courses for early-career graduate students, or “professionalization” courses. Whether these courses currently include a session on expanded career possibilities (i.e., beyond the tenure-track) varies widely by program. This is not unexpected as faculty might hesitate to discuss career paths outside of the tenure-track not because they are resistant to the idea but rather because this falls outside their own area of expertise and (most likely) their experiences. At the beginning of our work, we asked all of the humanities programs to send information about the professionalization training and measures already in place. After reviewing these, we realized that the creation of a modular-based professionalization framework might be an excellent starting point for curricular change. We also saw that there was much to learn from what is already working. By targeting existing professionalization curricular elements, almost all of which are currently geared toward academia, our modules could introduce professionalization elements of another kind within an already existing course rather than require additional programming. As we discuss in the “What’s Next” section, this work will begin in spring 2018, as we seek to implement modules on “Public Humanities” in four graduate humanities courses.

To assist faculty in conducting conversations about career strategy and choice in their classrooms, we’ve suggested the development of modules that could be inserted into the classroom over one to three sessions. The modules would be developed by the OCPPD with the participation of the Digital Initiatives, Teaching & Learning Center, GC Library, the Futures Initiative, and the Early Research Initiative. From an institutional perspective, this would align us with initiatives developed by the Provost’s Office to encourage curricular creativity and flexibility. On a national level, this would put us in line with some of the objectives of the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association (for example, the encouragement to “diversify learning objectives” from the Doctoral Student Career Planning Guide, recently produced by the MLA’s Connected Academics project). These proposed career modules allow for creative career development within individual programs to better accommodate their own students. They also allow faculty to draw directly upon the services and expertise of the various institutional offices and initiatives, rather than have to develop these modules on their own. This direct connection with faculty in the classroom, allows us to build professional development that is deeply integrated with components that are highly valued in all doctoral programs—namely, research and pedagogy.

Similarly, our other proposals for curricular change, such as those regarding the dissertation, internships, mentorship, and collaborative work, take advantage of existing or ongoing initiatives and programs at the GC. We have proposed partnerships and complemented opportunities already on offer to students rather than trying to create entirely new initiatives. For example, at the GC, the James Gallery, the Center for the Humanities, and Segal Center already provide successful work experiences for students in the fields of editing, criticism, curatorial practice, and public programming; we can build on the models already in place here as well and broaden them to reach more students. Developing our proposals in this way will create for us, during the implementation phase, an opportunity for genuinely sweeping change, the primary challenge of which will involve modification and organization rather than development from scratch.

Key to all our efforts to re-invent the humanities PhD for a wider range of careers is re-thinking admissions and modifying when necessary. On the one hand, we want to attract not only the best and brightest but those with keen interest in, or at least genuine openness to, a PhD that incorporates professionalization in public humanities. We encourage all degree programs at the GC to be fully transparent about career prospects for humanities PhDs. This is a point emphasized in the 2014 Report of the MLA Task Force on Doctoral Study, which states: “Departments must make it clear that the number of tenure-track positions is limited: there are not enough positions for all new PhD recipients. Graduate students should therefore consider a wide range of career prospects.” The point is an ethical one: an institution of higher learning is remiss if it knowingly admits students who enter on the basis of false expectations. However, we also see this as an opportunity to build connections between humanities scholars and a wider range of professions. We need the perspectives and approaches of deeply trained scholars in positions of leadership and authority across a wide range of sectors. As such, our admissions criteria might look more favorably on prospective students with an interest and aptitude in careers outside the classroom.

Were we to begin our project over, we would try to increase student involvement in the discussion and generation of ideas, particularly with respect to curricular change. Group discussions were largely driven by the administrators and faculty, who often found themselves having to speculate on student interests and motivations, and put those students who did serve on our project committees in the difficult position of having to interject themselves in a discussion sometimes dominated by administrative concerns. Though our cross-functional discussions were successful in many respects, we wondered whether students, in particular those on the two committees, were reluctant to participate in grant-related activities—or to participate with complete liberty—in the presence of university administrators and professors. To rectify this situation as we move forward, we will convene a student-only focus group in August 2017 that will meet to discuss specific topics corresponding to the progress of the Core Working Group and Project Steering Committee. We would also suggest that future grantees consider carefully the best ways to engage students in these conversations.

We would have also liked to see a greater number of alumni participating regularly through the course of the project. As you will read in Appendix B, some very exciting ideas for bold transformation came from our alumni. We found that alumni working in leadership roles outside the faculty path often have scheduling challenges that make it difficult for them to contribute to regular meetings. A good example of this is an English PhD alumnus, Peter Taback, who had committed to being in the Core Working Group. He enthusiastically participated in our monthly meetings during the fall semester, but in early 2017, he accepted a new position as Vice President for Communications at the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative. This new position meant a significantly busier schedule for him, one that included international travel. In the next phase of this project, we will work to design more ways for alumni to participate, engage, and contribute even when they are unable to be at the Graduate Center in person.

Over the course of the year, it became clear to us that the biggest obstacle to instituting transformative change is the institutional structure of programs at the Graduate Center. For example, making non-additive, uniform changes to the curricula of the humanities PhD entails the reduction of existing curricular requirements for a number of individual programs in order to make room for professional development training. The GC is requirement-heavy relative to other institutions; the number and kind of curricular requirements vary widely from program to program; and (as at other institutions) programs and faculty greatly value the autonomy they enjoy in developing curricula. So, despite the enthusiastic participation of Graduate Center leadership and the keen interest of a growing number of our faculty open to radical change, sweeping institutional transformation will first require transformation at the program level, from within each program and specific to each, which in turn will not be possible without the enthusiastic participation and keen interest of the faculty of each individual program. In many respects, change will need to start from the ground-up (i.e., working closely with programs to transform the academic culture at the GC). Uniformly transforming the academic culture will take time and may only come about through incremental change. Some headway in addressing this issue might be made through instituting specific transparency requirements for all programs in admissions and how programs publicly portray themselves to current and prospective students (i.e., requiring that more accurate and complete data about career outcomes be published on program websites). The Graduate Center’s own website (in particularly, the home page) could do more to reflect both excellence in research and our alumni success in a wider range of career fields. Rethinking how we talk about GC career outcomes to current students and the larger world will help change student, program, and institutional perspectives by recognizing the wide range of career options and skill sets that are applicable beyond the tenure-track. 

What Does It All Mean?

We’ll begin with a discussion of direct impacts on our students. About sixty students were exposed to a range of non-faculty careers at our May 4 Post Grad (Center) event; we had nearly twenty-five alumni and associates participate in a morning panel discussion and afternoon breakout sessions. Provost Joy Connolly opened the sessions and welcomed all of the attendees; faculty members were part of the audience throughout the day. Though the Provost’s Office has been a strong supporter of the Office of Career Planning and Professional Development since its founding in 2013, this was the first time that the Provost was the opening speaker at one of its events. Dr. Connolly’s presence and that of faculty members demonstrated to the students present that the institution supports students as they investigate and pursue a broader range of career paths.

We sent student attendees a short evaluation form after the event. Eighteen of them responded, about 30% of those who attended. In rating their satisfaction with the event on a scale of 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest), all respondents rated the event as a 3 or higher, with 89% of respondents giving the event a 4 or 5. Additionally, the majority of respondents rated the event’s effectiveness in adding to their knowledge on the topic of careers outside academia as a 4, with 95% of respondents reporting a 3 or higher. Respondents were also asked to rate the extent to which they will use the information they learned from the event to achieve their goals; 5% rated 2, 11% rated 3, 67% rated 4, and 17% rated 5. All respondents indicated that they would recommend this event to other students and alumni if it were held again in the future.

Students also shared with us ways similar types of events could be more meaningful. They asked us for more practical help in transitioning from graduate school to careers. This made us think that more could be done to publicize existing hands-on workshops on writing resumes, networking, and interviewing, as many of these resources are available to them already. They also asked for more one-on-one interaction with alumni working outside of the academy. How one transitions from a humanities PhD to the private sector, as some of our alumni have, was also something students want to hear more about. We were pleased, though, to have gotten a number of comments such as “This event was exceptional,” “Absolutely indispensable,” and “The team did a great job. If I had more time I’d provide specific comments about what I loved.”

If we were to do a similar type of event again, we would build in a better follow-up mechanism, and host a series of workshops that followed closely upon the larger event. In addition, we will use the list of students who attended to as a starting point for building our August 2017 focus groups.

This project also allowed us to strengthen connections that we had with several alumni working outside academia and make new ones. Many of the alumni we asked to participate in the May 4 event were unable to attend, but expressed an interest in other opportunities to connect with students building career paths outside of academe. Those who could not participate included a philosophy PhD working at a specialized investment management firm, a French PhD working as the chief of staff to a dean of a school of education, a comparative literature PhD working as a software engineer, and an English PhD working as a technical writer, among others. Generally, alumni working outside the tenure-track are pleasantly surprised to be asked to return to the Graduate Center, as they remember it as a privileged space for intellectual engagement and an institution they enjoyed attending, even if their career choices were unusual or not encouraged by their programs.

After the event, rather than conduct a formal evaluation of our alumni’s experience of the event, we asked them one simple question: What is one thing the Graduate Center or your program could have done better to help you move into a non-faculty career? Several participants took the time to respond. What follow are excerpts of their responses:

• I think just seeing examples of types of jobs/careers that are possible would have been really helpful, especially as I’d gone straight to grad school from undergrad, so had very little understanding about how the real world works.
• If there is one thing that the Graduate Center should be doing, it is helping academics get more digitally savvy to engage more directly in the digitalization that is dramatically reshaping the face of business and competition as we know it.
• My main recommendation… is for the GC to arrange funded opportunities for doctoral candidates to work in practical settings outside academia, particularly in professions that acknowledge the benefits of advanced degrees.
• It would be ideal to consider if not a course then a mini-course on publishing for the humanities.
• What the GC/History Department could have done better was to start talking about careers outside of academia from Day One.
• I think that it would have been helpful for the history department to have more talks or lectures from people in alt-ac careers.
• As a student at CUNY, I would have liked to have seen more emotional support for pursuing non-faculty careers.
• You could also contact private companies and other employers and try to do some sort of career day, that, in fact, may be the best idea I’ve had!
• One of my takeaways from last Thursday was that many students are looking for part time positions that might provide financial support as well as on-the-ground work experience.

Some of their suggestions have already been implemented to some extent by the Graduate Center. For example, the GC Digital Initiatives does provide our students with the opportunity to learn tools such as Python or R. At this point, however, these opportunities are additive, rather than embedded in the curriculum. We have included our alumni’s full responses in Appendix B, as their suggestions may be interesting for our NEH colleagues to read as well. Finally, alumni have been key links in developing some of our external partnerships, which we discuss in greater detail in the final section. 

Our work built engagement and renewed interest in humanities career questions across faculty, staff and senior administration. This project has reinforced commitments the Graduate Center has made in its most recent Strategic Plan to curricular innovation and interdisciplinarity and to maximizing the public impact of our scholarship. Specifically, this will mean encouraging courses and assignments that promote research and writing with a variety of audiences in mind. In addition, it means rethinking the professional development of our students to include preparation for non-faculty options and encouraging awareness of those options early in students’ graduate careers and even at the stage of admissions. As Peter Eckersall, the EO of our theatre program and Steering Committee member has noted, the career diversity of students is a virtue that is not only an exemplar for other students but in many fields, it is also helping scholars to rethink aspects of humanities disciplines. 

The project also met with enthusiastic support from our the Center for the Humanities, which has been working inter and intra-institutionally on community-engaged research and projects that promote CUNY student and faculty scholarship as well as wider public projects that often result in professional placement in careers that connect academic and public settings. Kendra Sullivan, the program manager at the Center, was very pleased to see colleagues coming from across departments and disciplines to codesign structures that support this kind of work in concrete ways. She is eager to see additional cross-institutional collaborations on the planning and implementation of innovative structures that really do enable students to imagine and realize futures that draw on their skills and help them to engage the public in their research.

The project director, Jennifer Furlong, has worked with graduate students on career issues for some time now. In meetings and conversations about the project, she has been pleased to see the level of interest and commitment from faculty both at the Graduate Center and nationally. Based on conversations here, at the Modern Language Association, at the Project Directors’ meeting, and at the AHA Career Diversity Institute, she noticed that faculty members are generally concerned about the welfare of their students and want them to have successful career outcomes. Moreover, it seems that most faculty members are worried about the future of the humanities and believe that having humanities PhDs in more employment sectors would do much to raise awareness of the value of having an advanced degree in the humanities. She was pleased to see so many program faculty members listed as Project Directors for this initiative.

One of the Core Working Group members, Duncan Faherty, reworked his section of the English Department’s Introduction to Doctoral Studies course to include visits by five guests (all of whom hold a PhD in a humanities field) in an effort to expose his first year students to a variety of non-tenure track career trajectories. On one level these visits proved generative for introducing the students to a multiplicity of career possibilities; yet, at the same time, these visits also surfaced how the majority of the students remained focused (despite being recursively exposed to information about the academic job market) on imagining that they would secure an academic position upon completion of their degrees. He was pleased to have widened the concerns of his course, but was simultaneously reminded that more work needs to be done across all levels of the curriculum in order to successfully integrate career planning into all stages of the degree process. David Olan, one of the project directors and associate provost, noted that the process has made him think more organically not just about the process and details of doctoral education but about the core purpose of the doctorate as a way of trying to grasp the range careers that it can prepare people for.

This year, many of the offices that support student professional development have seen a decrease in the number of students participating in professional development workshops and seminars. Some of the decrease may be due to the current political climate; many of our students have deep political commitments and may be using what extra time they have to do this work. But student engagement is a continuing challenge for many offices at the Graduate Center, where students often are not even in the building, as their teaching responsibilities at other CUNY campuses have them travelling across the city, from the Bronx to Staten Island. This situation confirms for us the need to make changes at the curricular level, in spite of how challenging that work often seems. Our sense, in speaking to colleagues at the Project Directors meeting and during the course of the year, is that colleagues at many institutions have come to a similar conclusion.

What’s Next?

Our White Paper will be posted online to our project website so that our website provides a complete overview of our project. Due in part to the presence of our extensive meeting notes, our website provides a summary of our project aims, accomplishments, and shortcomings, as well as indicates areas in which GC faculty and students might continue seeking changes on the individual program level.

Following our Post Grad (Center) event, Graduate Fellows in the OCPPD began creating a humanities workforce toolkit. The toolkit will seek to clearly identify the various ongoing initiatives and career services currently offered by the institution, as well as to provide resources for students, staff, and faculty that support graduate students’ pursuits of careers off the tenure track. Links to important resources, such as Versatile PhD and Connected Academics, have already been made available. Also for summer 2017, ten students were hired for internships in non-faculty positions at the Brooklyn Rail, the Vera Institute for Justice (four placements), ExpandED Schools (two placements), Open House New York, Global Fund for Women, and the Department of Investigation’s Office of the Inspector General for the NYPD. Nearly half of these positions were developed through partnerships with alumni. Four additional students were hired for summer internships in public-facing humanities research positions at The Morgan Library and Museum (two placements) and The New York Botanical Gardens (two placements). These opportunities are meant to encourage graduate students to explore diverse career options while developing skills and experience that will advance their career goals. We will continue to cultivate our relationships with these and other receptive organizations, such as The New-York Historical Society, The Center for Court Innovation, Community Solutions, and Good Shepherd Services to continue increasing the number of job and internship opportunities available to GC students.

Jennifer Furlong, Emily Seamone, and Kaysi Holman will attend the Graduate Career Consortium (GCC) Meeting in Houston, TX, from June 27 through 30. The theme of this year’s conference is “Innovation and Insight.” Founded in 1987, the GCC is a professional network of staff and administrators who provide professional and career development for PhDs and postdoctoral scholars at their universities and institutions. Conference takeaways will be incorporated into our project website toolkit and the career services offered through the OCPPD.

The final meeting of the Core Working Group will be July 11. At this meeting, we will have further discussions about next steps for our project ideas. We’re particularly interested in how we might continue conversations with program EO’s and faculty members so as to aid in the implementation of the ideas for curricular change outlined during the May 4 faculty discussion. We will also continue to push for interventions within individual programs. Interventions can be scaled depending on the desires of the faculty and students. A small intervention might be organizing an alumni panel that features graduates in non-faculty careers, while radical interventions might be interdisciplinary, team-taught courses that focus on public issues. The trick is to find an open door for intervention, whether it be an assignment, single class session, or entire course. The Provost has already encouraged members of the Core Working Group to proceed with plans for another public humanities event next spring. Ideas for this event developed during the joint June project meeting of the Core Working Group and Project Steering Committee and were spearheaded by Dr. Faherty. In the fall, various faculty members from different programs—those who expressed enthusiasm during previous faculty discussions—will be encouraged to include a public-facing assignment as part of their semester-long courses. Public-facing assignments, such as writing op-eds or program notes, will encourage students to think about and write for multiple audiences. The spring event will then provide a space for actual public engagement where students can talk about their work with both scholarly and public audiences. Promotions for this event will be knit into a larger narrative that includes the NEH Next Generation Humanities PhD Planning Grant so that faculty and students know these activities are directly linked to larger endeavors and that they will continue to be encouraged.

The Core Working Group will also use the July 11 meeting to discuss the requirements of the Next Generation Humanities PhD Implementation Grant. We fully intend to submit a project proposal for an implementation grant, so we want to begin discussions about next steps as early as possible. Out of a desire both to continue the aims of the current project and to dream about larger project implementation, we will immediately begin making plans to host small student meetings or lunches in August before the fall semester begins. During these meetings, we will share the contents of this white paper, as well as the key ideas generated during project meetings. We want more students to be enthusiastic about our project’s aims, and we want to make adjustments in response to their concerns and criticisms. Without a strong student coalition backing the project, future ideas for change will not gain much traction. Student support will also be crucial for building additional faculty support as we continue to make apparent the need to transform the training given to humanities PhDs at the Graduate Center.

Finally, our work on “The New PhD: A Renaissance of Public Engagement” coincided with two important developments at the Graduate Center. The first was the AHA’s selection of the Graduate Center’s history program as a participant in the Career Diversity for Historians Initiative. Spearheaded by faculty member Herman Bennett, a well-known historian of the African diaspora, participation in this project will further the history program’s efforts to support a broader range of career preparation for its students. Secondly, our work on “The New PhD” took place during a year of strategic planning work for the Graduate Center, work that culminated in “Building for the Future: The Graduate Center Strategic Plan 2017-2022.” Several members of the Core Working Group and Project Steering Committee participated extensively in the strategic planning process, including David Olan, who co-chaired the Faculty, Students, and Programs Task Force, and Duncan Faherty and Jennifer Furlong, who co-chaired the Student Experience Task Force. Many of the GC strategic plan’s priorities and goals echo what we discussed during the course of our NEH projects. One of the four main priorities, for example, is “Advancing our public mission by increasing impact.” As mentioned above, this aligns with one of our implementation goals—to provide more resources and training to PhD students as they speak and write about their work to a broader range of publics. Our work also coincides with other major priorities spelled out in the strategic plan; these include:

• providing more resources to faculty and students who want to work interdisciplinarily;
• expanding the scope of digital projects;
• establishing a Statistics Center to provide faculty or students great resources for quantitative and empirical research training;
• building on existing efforts to share a greater amount of research with global publics through digital methods;
• aligning academic milestones, such as exams, with broad professional development; and
• creating a career development and mentorship program that will enhance graduates’ professional prospects outside the academy.

We are pleased that so much of our work aligns with institutional priorities. This bodes well for our success as we move forward to implementation.