Connecting our Work to National Conversations on Graduate Education
By Sarah Hokanson, Assistant Provost for Professional Development & Postdoctoral Affairs
Just as you wouldn’t conduct your doctoral thesis research totally disconnected from the wider research within your discipline, our team often attends national conferences and participates in collaborative projects as a way of connecting the work we do here at BU to the bigger picture of graduate education in the United States and around the world. From time to time, I’ll use Food for Thought to reveal the behind the scenes thinking that goes into our programming and resources for doctoral students.
You may have seen the articles in BU Today or the Daily Free Press celebrating BU’s selection into the Association of American Universities (AAU) PhD Education Initiative, a cohort of eight universities. Our selection represents the accomplishments BU has achieved to date as well as the exciting work we have left to do, and our work on this initiative is led by Associate Provost for Graduate Affairs (and my boss) Daniel Kleinman. Daniel’s support has made this new project possible, and he continues to support our new professional development programs and resources for doctoral students.
Six doctoral programs at BU are among 34 within the cohort – Biology, Biostatistics, Classical Studies, Counseling Psychology and Applied Human Development, Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, and Sociology. The goal of participating in this new initiative is “to promote more student-centered doctoral education at AAU universities by making diverse PhD career pathways visible, valued, and viable.” But what does that really mean for doctoral students at BU?
Student-centered is jargon that means any type of learning that is focused on the outcomes of individual students. Simply put, your PhD should be as much about you as it is about what BU and your program has to offer you, and student-centered education puts those two things into better balance. Visible, valued, and viable are buzz terms focused on streams of work –
- Visible – Deciding on a career path should be an informed decision. Data transparency through our PhD Profiles tool will make PhD program data—including data about the career pathways and employment trends of BU alumni—widely available to incoming and current students. This data will inform our departments about how best to shape their doctoral program to meet their students’ long-term needs.
- Valued – For decades, doctoral education has been largely an apprenticeship model, preparing students for careers as faculty. This model is now outdated, as career opportunities outside of academia have expanded and those within academia are more limited. Through the work of offices like Professional Development & Postdoctoral Affairs and BU’s BEST, there is now a broad awareness that careers outside of the academic landscape are both exciting and critical for our graduates. But being aware of and valuing non-academic careers are not quite the same things. We want all of our students to feel a sense of belonging within their scholarly discipline regardless of their career choice, and we look forward to learning from our peer institutions in the cohort about ways they have shifted their institutional and departmental cultures.
- Viable – Viable jobs are those that align with your skills, interests, and values. I am looking forward to working with departments, other offices across BU, and our AAU cohort to develop innovative tools and resources to help you explore and plan for your career, as well as develop the skills and qualifications you will need to get there.
Each of the six departmental teams as well as our central administration team led by the team within Graduate Affairs has student members to ensure that our work includes the perspectives and ideas of our doctoral students. However, if you are not within one of our pilot departments and would still like to contribute your ideas to this initiative, please email gradpd@bu.edu to share your thoughts with us as we get started.