Designing Your Futures for PhDs Session 1: What Do We Mean by “the Future”?

Session 2 Description:

Theme: Current-state awareness and self-knowledge as inputs to career design
Participants begin with the DYL Life Dashboard to assess Health, Work, Play, and Love, then add three forms of self-knowledge from the original microcredential: values, strengths, and sources of motivation. For doctoral students and postdocs, this helps surface how research, teaching, advisor relationships, funding, prestige, security, and identity shape both satisfaction and motivation. The goal is an evidence-based picture of what matters, what participants do well, what drives them, and where a designable tension exists today.

About the Series:
Designing Your Futures adapts the core framework of Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans to the distinctive realities of doctoral students and postdocs. The program keeps Designing Your Life visibly at the center while preserving an explicit Princeton emphasis on self-awareness: participants examine their values, interests, strengths, motivations, and identities before they begin designing possible futures.

The Princeton adaptation also adds a lens from Design Futures. Before participants can design a future, they benefit from understanding how people imagine and reason about the future in the first place. Psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, philosophy, and design frame the future differently. These perspectives help participants see that a career future is neither a single prediction nor a plan that must be correct. It is a space of possibilities that can be made vivid, tested, revised, and acted upon.

Across ten 90-minute sessions, participants read a small amount each week, learn one primary idea, apply one primary tool in a studio-style activity, share and learn from peers, and add one artifact to a cumulative Career Design Portfolio. The aim is not to produce a fixed career plan. The aim is to leave participants with a repeatable method for navigating uncertainty throughout an evolving professional life.

Session 3 Description:

Theme: Meaning, coherence, and criteria for evaluating futures
Participants move from describing themselves to articulating what they believe work is for, what gives life meaning, and what “Good Work” looks like for them. The aim is not to write a permanent personal mission statement. It is to create a provisional compass that can be used to evaluate future options. For PhDs, this helps separate inherited measures of success — prestige, publication, institutional affiliation, disciplinary approval — from personally meaningful criteria.

About the Series:
Designing Your Futures adapts the core framework of Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans to the distinctive realities of doctoral students and postdocs. The program keeps Designing Your Life visibly at the center while preserving an explicit Princeton emphasis on self-awareness: participants examine their values, interests, strengths, motivations, and identities before they begin designing possible futures.

The Princeton adaptation also adds a lens from Design Futures. Before participants can design a future, they benefit from understanding how people imagine and reason about the future in the first place. Psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, philosophy, and design frame the future differently. These perspectives help participants see that a career future is neither a single prediction nor a plan that must be correct. It is a space of possibilities that can be made vivid, tested, revised, and acted upon.

Across ten 90-minute sessions, participants read a small amount each week, learn one primary idea, apply one primary tool in a studio-style activity, share and learn from peers, and add one artifact to a cumulative Career Design Portfolio. The aim is not to produce a fixed career plan. The aim is to leave participants with a repeatable method for navigating uncertainty throughout an evolving professional life.

Session 4 Description:

Theme: Dysfunctional beliefs, gravity problems, and generative questions
Doctoral training can create powerful default assumptions: leaving academia wastes the PhD; specialization narrows options; prestige is evidence of fit; a nonlinear path signals failure; one should finish before exploring; or a clear plan must precede action. Participants learn to distinguish useful constraints from beliefs that have become artificially absolute. They practice DYL reframing and the design-thinking “How Might I” structure to turn a stuck thought into a question that generates experiments.


About the Series:
Designing Your Futures adapts the core framework of Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans to the distinctive realities of doctoral students and postdocs. The program keeps Designing Your Life visibly at the center while preserving an explicit Princeton emphasis on self-awareness: participants examine their values, interests, strengths, motivations, and identities before they begin designing possible futures.

The Princeton adaptation also adds a lens from Design Futures. Before participants can design a future, they benefit from understanding how people imagine and reason about the future in the first place. Psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, philosophy, and design frame the future differently. These perspectives help participants see that a career future is neither a single prediction nor a plan that must be correct. It is a space of possibilities that can be made vivid, tested, revised, and acted upon.

Across ten 90-minute sessions, participants read a small amount each week, learn one primary idea, apply one primary tool in a studio-style activity, share and learn from peers, and add one artifact to a cumulative Career Design Portfolio. The aim is not to produce a fixed career plan. The aim is to leave participants with a repeatable method for navigating uncertainty throughout an evolving professional life.

Session 5 Description:

Theme: Multiple futures, future selves, and possibility
This is the central generative session. Participants create multiple plausible lives rather than treating one career path as the answer. DYL’s Odyssey Plans are paired with future-self research from Design Futures: vividness and psychological connection to a future self can change how people evaluate present choices. The purpose is not prediction. It is to expand the field of possibilities and make several of them concrete enough to learn from.

About the Series:
Designing Your Futures adapts the core framework of Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans to the distinctive realities of doctoral students and postdocs. The program keeps Designing Your Life visibly at the center while preserving an explicit Princeton emphasis on self-awareness: participants examine their values, interests, strengths, motivations, and identities before they begin designing possible futures.

The Princeton adaptation also adds a lens from Design Futures. Before participants can design a future, they benefit from understanding how people imagine and reason about the future in the first place. Psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, philosophy, and design frame the future differently. These perspectives help participants see that a career future is neither a single prediction nor a plan that must be correct. It is a space of possibilities that can be made vivid, tested, revised, and acted upon.

Across ten 90-minute sessions, participants read a small amount each week, learn one primary idea, apply one primary tool in a studio-style activity, share and learn from peers, and add one artifact to a cumulative Career Design Portfolio. The aim is not to produce a fixed career plan. The aim is to leave participants with a repeatable method for navigating uncertainty throughout an evolving professional life.

Session 6 Description:

Theme: Learning by trying
Participants shift from imagining futures to gathering real-world evidence. A prototype is not an audition for a permanent career. It is a low-cost way to answer a question. Prototype conversations can test assumptions about people, culture, incentives, and daily work; prototype experiences can test activities and environments. The PhD adaptation emphasizes experiments that can be run while still in graduate school or a postdoc rather than waiting for a formal transition point.

About the Series:
Designing Your Futures adapts the core framework of Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans to the distinctive realities of doctoral students and postdocs. The program keeps Designing Your Life visibly at the center while preserving an explicit Princeton emphasis on self-awareness: participants examine their values, interests, strengths, motivations, and identities before they begin designing possible futures.

The Princeton adaptation also adds a lens from Design Futures. Before participants can design a future, they benefit from understanding how people imagine and reason about the future in the first place. Psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, philosophy, and design frame the future differently. These perspectives help participants see that a career future is neither a single prediction nor a plan that must be correct. It is a space of possibilities that can be made vivid, tested, revised, and acted upon.

Across ten 90-minute sessions, participants read a small amount each week, learn one primary idea, apply one primary tool in a studio-style activity, share and learn from peers, and add one artifact to a cumulative Career Design Portfolio. The aim is not to produce a fixed career plan. The aim is to leave participants with a repeatable method for navigating uncertainty throughout an evolving professional life.

Session 7 Description:

Theme: Decision quality, premortems, and learning from failure
Choosing becomes easier when participants stop treating decisions as guarantees. This session combines DYL’s emphasis on choosing and failure immunity with the premortem, backcasting, and mental-time-travel practices used in past Design Futures and the GradFUTURES workshop. Participants assume a preferred future did not happen, generate reasons why, and sort those reasons to distinguish design challenges, useful pivot points, and conditions outside their control.

About the Series:
Designing Your Futures adapts the core framework of Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans to the distinctive realities of doctoral students and postdocs. The program keeps Designing Your Life visibly at the center while preserving an explicit Princeton emphasis on self-awareness: participants examine their values, interests, strengths, motivations, and identities before they begin designing possible futures.

The Princeton adaptation also adds a lens from Design Futures. Before participants can design a future, they benefit from understanding how people imagine and reason about the future in the first place. Psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, philosophy, and design frame the future differently. These perspectives help participants see that a career future is neither a single prediction nor a plan that must be correct. It is a space of possibilities that can be made vivid, tested, revised, and acted upon.

Across ten 90-minute sessions, participants read a small amount each week, learn one primary idea, apply one primary tool in a studio-style activity, share and learn from peers, and add one artifact to a cumulative Career Design Portfolio. The aim is not to produce a fixed career plan. The aim is to leave participants with a repeatable method for navigating uncertainty throughout an evolving professional life.

Session 8 Description:

Theme: Meaning beyond job titles
Participants return to the original microcredential’s question of impact: what kinds of contribution matter to them, and through what kinds of work might they contribute? The session draws on the Design Futures “Future Impact Portfolio” idea of placing yourself inside a future world rather than talking about impact abstractly. Participants examine how research, teaching, innovation, leadership, policy, entrepreneurship, public engagement, and other forms of work can create value without assuming that impact requires a particular title or sector.

About the Series:
Designing Your Futures adapts the core framework of Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans to the distinctive realities of doctoral students and postdocs. The program keeps Designing Your Life visibly at the center while preserving an explicit Princeton emphasis on self-awareness: participants examine their values, interests, strengths, motivations, and identities before they begin designing possible futures.

The Princeton adaptation also adds a lens from Design Futures. Before participants can design a future, they benefit from understanding how people imagine and reason about the future in the first place. Psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, philosophy, and design frame the future differently. These perspectives help participants see that a career future is neither a single prediction nor a plan that must be correct. It is a space of possibilities that can be made vivid, tested, revised, and acted upon.

Across ten 90-minute sessions, participants read a small amount each week, learn one primary idea, apply one primary tool in a studio-style activity, share and learn from peers, and add one artifact to a cumulative Career Design Portfolio. The aim is not to produce a fixed career plan. The aim is to leave participants with a repeatable method for navigating uncertainty throughout an evolving professional life.

Session 9 Description:

Theme: Career design with other people
Life design is not a solitary optimization problem. Participants need people who can challenge assumptions, open new contexts, offer lived information, and help sustain experiments. This session combines DYL’s Build a Team logic with professional narrative. Participants practice explaining who they are without pretending their future is already settled: what they have done, what themes connect their work, what they are exploring now, and what they want to learn next.

About the Series:
Designing Your Futures adapts the core framework of Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans to the distinctive realities of doctoral students and postdocs. The program keeps Designing Your Life visibly at the center while preserving an explicit Princeton emphasis on self-awareness: participants examine their values, interests, strengths, motivations, and identities before they begin designing possible futures.

The Princeton adaptation also adds a lens from Design Futures. Before participants can design a future, they benefit from understanding how people imagine and reason about the future in the first place. Psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, philosophy, and design frame the future differently. These perspectives help participants see that a career future is neither a single prediction nor a plan that must be correct. It is a space of possibilities that can be made vivid, tested, revised, and acted upon.

Across ten 90-minute sessions, participants read a small amount each week, learn one primary idea, apply one primary tool in a studio-style activity, share and learn from peers, and add one artifact to a cumulative Career Design Portfolio. The aim is not to produce a fixed career plan. The aim is to leave participants with a repeatable method for navigating uncertainty throughout an evolving professional life.

Session 10 Description:

Theme: Integration, reflection, and continuing the design process
The final session is a synthesis rather than another content-heavy class. Participants review the artifacts they have built, identify how their thinking changed, and decide what deserves further experimentation. Drawing on the Design Futures idea of rehearsing the future, they treat the portfolio as a set of hypotheses and evidence rather than a declaration of one final career plan. The course ends with a 90-day design plan anchored in experiments, relationships, and behaviors that are within reach now.

About the Series:
Designing Your Futures adapts the core framework of Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans to the distinctive realities of doctoral students and postdocs. The program keeps Designing Your Life visibly at the center while preserving an explicit Princeton emphasis on self-awareness: participants examine their values, interests, strengths, motivations, and identities before they begin designing possible futures.

The Princeton adaptation also adds a lens from Design Futures. Before participants can design a future, they benefit from understanding how people imagine and reason about the future in the first place. Psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, philosophy, and design frame the future differently. These perspectives help participants see that a career future is neither a single prediction nor a plan that must be correct. It is a space of possibilities that can be made vivid, tested, revised, and acted upon.

Across ten 90-minute sessions, participants read a small amount each week, learn one primary idea, apply one primary tool in a studio-style activity, share and learn from peers, and add one artifact to a cumulative Career Design Portfolio. The aim is not to produce a fixed career plan. The aim is to leave participants with a repeatable method for navigating uncertainty throughout an evolving professional life.