RDI Content

Takeaways

Establishing and maintaining a healthy advising relationship: Overview of how to sustain a healthy advising relationship and understand the responsibilities that come with being an advisee.

Tips from the top: Open and honest Q&A to help understand the broader picture of institution and departmental structure and to an extent politics.

Building Community: The importance of building a support group or network 

Why This Content?

• • Maintaining a positive advising relationship is a key factor for student retention.
  • Learning how to handle disagreements has been shown to increase persistence.
  • Awareness of the broader departmental politics and environment can be key to the development of graduate students and their persistence.
  • Students in engineering from different populations have been found to struggle with this awareness.

Key Takeaways

• • Shifting from a prescribed schedule and explicit assessment guidelines in the undergraduate to a hidden process at the doctoral level is often a barrier for students who lack self-management.
  • The writing process can often be a challenge for engineering doctoral students as they may not have developed these skills in their undergraduate.

Why This Content?

• Managing Time and Procrastination: Overview on strategies at both at the program and daily level on how to optimize the use of their time.
• Engaging with the literature: How to find and read the literature as well as an overview of the publication process. 
• Writing Process: Initial strategies for engaging with the writing process. 
• Motivation: Discussion of the factors affecting their motivation to graduate 

Key Takeaways

• Navigating the PhD while Enhancing Cultural Capital: How to reconcile who they are and their identities with the doctoral journey where everyone is different. 
• Mental Health in Grad School: Good habits for mental health and how to identify threats to it.  
• Work-life balance: How to maintain a healthy balance between the requirements of grad school and personal life 

Why This Content?

• • Doctoral students often experience impostor syndrome and lack belongingness.
  • Managing such and creating support systems such as peer groups and mentoring relationships can help students manage to be visibly different from the norm in academia and persist in the doctorate.
  • The continuity of these feelings can develop mental health issues and impact doctoral progress.

Key Takeaways

• Doctoral career paths. A discussion panel of potential careers in government, industry, and academia for STEM Ph.D.  

• Transferable Skills from a doctorate. Skills learnt in the PhD that are transferable outside academia.  

Why This Content?

Over 70% of engineering and other STEM doctorate holders have been shown to pursue careers outside of academia, such as industry and government.