Sessions For: Rackham Graduate School

Rackham is sponsoring a two-day workshop for doctoral candidates in the sciences to engage in skill and career exploration, gain insight into a variety of career paths, identify their transferable knowledge and skills, and practice communicating these to others. This event is reserved for University of Michigan and Wayne State Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows.

Long before you are on the job market, it is important to prepare for the offer. Negotiating an academic position should never be an afterthought. In fact, wise negotiating requires education, planning, and practice. This interactive seminar will provide you with strategies to determine what to ask for and how to ask for what you need and want. You will also leave with recommendations concerning what you should do before, during, and after the job offer.

Graduate students are regularly told the importance of networking to explore careers and identify job opportunities. However, we know that networking is understood differently in diverse cultural contexts. In this session, a career development expert will 1) share what networking means in the American context and 2) address how students can engage in career activities in comfortable ways. Participants will discuss with peers how networking is different in their cultural contexts, and identify ways that they can successfully network in the American context. This session is a collaboration between Rackham Graduate School, Graduate Rackham International (GRIN) and the Engineering Career Resource Center (ECRC).

As a graduate student or postdoctoral scholar, you have likely already engaged in a number of difficult conversations throughout your life. Perhaps some of them went well, and others did not go as well as you had hoped. What distinguished these conversations from one another? In this interactive session, Rackham experts in conflict resolution will discuss how to navigate difficult conversations. You will leave with concrete strategies for productive dialogue and clear communication, able to approach difficult conversations with more confidence in the future.