Designing Your Futures for PhDs Session 6: Prototyping- Career Experiments, Not Career Decisions

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.