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

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.