For their work as part of the Leadership Academy 2020 cohort, the Professional Growth Group aimed to develop a series of workshops to provide professional development opportunities to their fellow graduate students based on community feedback. In the process of narrowing the focus of their efforts for the eight week period of the Academy, the Professional Growth Group determined that not everyone has access to information about pursuing alternative academic careers. Being that the current academic job market offers increasingly fewer opportunities, more graduate students are seeking information about alternative options. As such, our group decided to produce a series of workshops for students across all departments that prepared students to pursue alt-ac careers and allowed them to be exposed to alt-ac careers before leaving graduate school. Through this work, we hoped to destigmatize the process of seeking alternative careers to academia and provide a safe space for students whose networks may not be as supportive of this decision. While we wanted to target our workshops at graduate students, we also wanted to network with people on campus who either already provide workshops and spaces for more professional development or those who have the authority to help further this work. As such, in addition to the widely circulated flyers for two workshops that we would host during the period of the Academy, we developed an online space on iteach.msu.edu for graduate students to connect and access alt-ac resources.
On February 25, 2020, the Professional Growth Group hosted two workshops: 1) Leveraging your Membership, which focused on teaching students to leverage their service experience to transferable skills to add to your CV or resume; and 2) Translate Your Thesis to the World, which helped students learn to describe their research in three minutes using only a single powerpoint slide. We had a total of five students attend, and received generally positive feedback. Both presentations were recorded and uploaded to our iteach.msu.edu page so students who were unable to attend the workshops in person could have the opportunity to interact with us and each other virtually. We also began to reach out to campus offices who might want to connect with our group and help us circulate existing campus resources. Looking forward, if we have the opportunity to continue our work on this project we would develop a series of interviews of podcasts of MSU grad student alumni who have careers in alt-ac, host additional workshops, and extend our recruitment of our online group to encourage more active discussion about pursuing alt-ac careers among students.
Powerpoint with Short Video Presentation: https://iteach.msu.edu/posts/preview_attachments?post_id=1507
