Workshops
Equipment Series
The Equipment Series of Workshops are designed to provide graduate students with tools and skills to navigate 5 key areas of their graduate journey. These workshops can be delivered as individual 60-75 minute workshops over the course of several months or packaged into a half-day workshop.
Making the Best Use of Your Time
Student schedules in graduate school are jam packed in the first and second year with courses, teaching assignments, research rotations, and getting settled into new environments. However, the schedule becomes very flexible as the first milestones involving courses are complete and research is the primary focus towards the dissertation. This practical workshop will help students assess and establish priorities at different stages in their journey and develop a semester strategic plan with accountability to stay on track and motivated towards their degree.
What did they Just Say?!!
Research advisors play an important role in the graduate student journey and unfortunately advisors and mentors are not always synonymous. It takes courage for students to approach their advisors to discuss data and seek help when problems go awry, or even to ask for time away from the lab. This session will guide students through when and what to communicate to their advisors and how to walk away from meetings with advisors with clarity of next steps from those discussions.
Proactively Managing Stress, Anxiety, and Depression
Panic attacks, bouts of depression, and even suicidal thoughts and actions are consuming graduate students as they battle to stay above water both in their program and in life. These students often feel alone but the truth is they likely have lab mates or class mates suffering in silence also. We will spend time in this session covering strategies to proactively avoid and minimize these mental and emotion health issues and give students the ability to recognize when to get additional help.
Honing your Expertise
Work hours in graduate school can vary dramatically from 40 to 80 hours depending on the group, advisor, and departmental cultures. What is most important however, is how a student spends their time during those hours and whether or not they are efficiently developing skills in their discipline and the expertise in their field. In this session, we take students through a 5 step process for truly becoming an expert in their dissertation area.
Empowerment Series
Pursuing your PhD with Purpose is designed to transform the minds of graduate students by challenging them to focus early on a vision for their life. The PhD in STEM is more than just getting a job in academia, government, or industry which have been presented as three options. In this session, we help participants to identify their career goals and how to take advantage of their graduate training to make them competitive towards achieving that goal.
Transformational Series
The Transformational Series was created for those individuals and entities that have the biggest impact on graduate student journeys. Faculty, directors of graduate studies, and administrators in graduate schools dramatically shape the culture and environment for students. These workshops are designed to change the status quo about the graduate journey by challenging participants to examine and take a deep dive into their individual and departmental cultures and providing them with strategies to ensure healthy, vibrant, and productive environments for students from all backgrounds and with many different purposes and plans for their degrees.
For advisors:
Sorry, they are not you: How to get over your students disappointing you?
Helping to cultivate your students’ purposes and dreams
Recognizing red flags or signs of student stress, distress, or cries for help
For graduate program coordinators:
How to better support graduate students in today’s society?
