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 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

Planning for a Sustainable Career
Saturday, September 27, 2008 - Kellogg Center

Dr. Peter Berg (Professor, Labor and Industrial Relations)
Dr. Roger Baldwin (Professor, Educational Administration)
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)
David Graf, Financial Planner

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.

Planning, Managing, and Funding the Research Project
Saturday, April 5, 2008 – Big Ten B, Kellogg Center

Featured Presenters:

Planning, writing, and getting funding for a research idea as a doctoral student, new post-doc or a faculty member can be a daunting task. How do you manage a research project from proposal to completion, and how does this process vary by discipline? Are there foundations, agencies, non-government organization or corporations you should apply to for funding your type of project? How should you “package” your research proposal to meet the criteria of funding sources and what are the various components of a budget you will need to include? For those working in research teams, receiving a grant is only the first step in pursuing a project. What type of personnel do you need to hire for timely completion of the project, and how will they be supervised and evaluated? What types of project reports have to be filed, when, and how will you develop them to make sure they are of high quality? How will project expenditures be tracked to insure the project is completed on budget and meets the requirements of the contract?

This workshop will address research project management skills and proposal writing for a variety of disciplines. Panel members in the morning representing various government agencies and foundations will talk about what it takes to develop a fundable research proposal in their respective organizations and suggestions for managing new projects. Afternoon breakout sessions will provide workshop participants with disciplinary specific practical experiences in searching for potential funding sources, developing ideas for grants, and getting an inside look at how their proposals will be scrutinized by review panels. Participants will have ample opportunity to interact with breakout session facilitators to get tips for initiating their professional research careers.