Designing Your Futures for PhDs Session 4: Getting Unstuck: Reframing Doctoral Career Beliefs

Session Description:
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.

Learning objectives:

• Identify one belief that is constraining exploration.
• Determine whether the issue is a gravity problem, a real constraint, or a reframable assumption.
• Convert a stuck belief into a generative How Might I question.

Series Description: 
Uncertain about what comes next? You don't need a plan to begin. For many doctoral students and postdocs, uncertainty about the future makes career planning feel impossible, so they put it off. This program starts from a different premise: not knowing what comes next isn't the same as being behind —it's a workable place to start.

Designing Your Futures adapts the Designing Your Life framework by Stanford professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans to the realities of doctoral and postdoctoral life. It begins with you, not with job titles. Before imagining any future, you'll explore your values, interests, strengths, motivations, and identities, so that what you build is grounded in who you actually are.

From there, we borrow ideas from psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, philosophy, and design to change how you think about the future itself. A career future isn't a prediction you have to get right or a plan you'll be judged on. It's a space of possibilities that you can picture, test, revise, and act on in small, low-risk ways. You already know how to approach open questions with curiosity and rigor. This program helps you turn those skills toward your own path.

Over eight 90-minute sessions, the workload stays light and the rhythm stays consistent. Each week you'll:

-Read a short piece
-Learn one core idea
-Try one practical tool in a hands-on, studio-style activity
-Share and learn alongside peers who understand your situation
-Add one artifact to your own Career Design Portfolio

You won't leave with a final, fixed career plan. You'll leave with something more useful: a set of hypotheses about future options and a plan for testing those, as well as a repeatable method for navigating uncertainty-- and the confidence to use it at any stage of your professional life.

Facilitated by Princeton graduate alumnus and former Keller Center Design Thinking lecturer, Chris MacPherson *08.