Achieving your career aspirations calls for a continuous professional development process to be woven into your graduate education experience. The Graduate College offers many forms of professional development support designed to assist you throughout the entire process—from onboarding to graduate school, to succeeding in your graduate studies, to exploring potential career paths, to enhancing competitive skills needed to thrive in those paths, and to effectively managing your future career. Visit the links below to learn how you can develop core professional competencies.
Professional Development
-
Center for Communication Excellence (CCE)
A wide range of free opportunities to enhance your written, oral, and digital communication skills, including: individual consultations, peer review and accountability groups, peer speaking practice groups, Graduate Studies (GR ST) courses in advanced writing and speaking, seminar series, on-demand workshops, and more.
-
Grad Success Program
A series of Graduate Studies courses (GR ST 5310, 5320, 5330, 5340) designed to help students build capacity in the area of preparing high quality dissertations, theses, and creative components by mapping skill development opportunities with the stages of progression toward a graduate degree.
-
Theses, Dissertations, and Creative Components
Continuous, tailored support in research-related endeavors available through individual writing assistance, document formatting review, writing retreats, bootcamps, workshops, downloadable toolkits, and more.
-
Preparing Future Faculty (PFF)
A series of four Graduate Studies courses (GR ST 5850, 5860, 5870, 5880) that equip graduate students and postdoctoral scholars with skills in classroom teaching, mentoring, departmental service, and more to prepare them for academic careers at a variety of institutions.
-
English for Teaching Purposes
A series of Graduate Studies courses (GR ST 5400A, B/C, D) in English for teaching purposes for international graduate students.
-
Graduate Career Services Office
Individual career coaching and events focused on effective strategies for exploring academic and non-academic pathways as well as developing key skills such as networking, personal branding, preparation of job application materials, interviewing, negotiation, and more to become competitive for the job market.
-
Career Planning
8-week program that provides resources and self-assessment information and equips graduate students with the skills needed to make informed career choices both within and beyond academia. The program topics and materials are adapted from the pd|hub Collections, an NIH-funded collection of evidence-based practices to support PhD professional development.
-
Online Career Training
Free access to two career training platforms: Beyond Grad School for master's students and Beyond the Professoriate for doctoral students.
-
Graduate College Emerging Leadership Academy (GC-ELA)
One-year program focusing on leadership research/theory/practice, ethics, teamwork, communication, etc. to trains leaders with broad career aspirations in industry, government, NGO, entrepreneurship, and academia.
-
ISU Innovation Corps (I-Corps)
National Science Foundation-funded program provides opportunities to develop entrepreneurial knowledge and skills for any career path, focusing on increasing the impact of new technologies and innovations through assessment of their market opportunity and commercial potential.