Shape Your Ph.D. 1: Connecting your Why: Threading Purpose, Meaning and Impact into the PhD experience

Graduate students enrolled in the GradFUTURES Alumni Mentoring program are required to attend one of the mentee orientations, on either October 12 or October 25 or October 28.

This orientation will be on Zoom for those who couldn't participate at the in-person orientations.
At the orientation, you will meet other graduate students in the mentoring program cohort, and learn, reflect and discuss on
- broad benefits of mentorship toward academic success, wellbeing and career development
- how best to leverage the alumni mentoring program for your development goals
- expectations of the mentoring program
- best practices of connecting, setting goals and cadence of the mentor-mentee relationship

GradFUTURES is pleased to launch “Shape your PhD”- an interdisciplinary learning cohort on Thursdays, Sep 22-Nov 10, 6-7.30 pm. This learning cohort, designed especially for G1 and G2 students, will involve active learning methods driving the direction of content. Over 6-7 sessions, join us to reimagine, explore and visualize a holistic PhD experience focused on your personal and professional growth.

This is the fifth session of Shape your PhD interdisciplinary learning cohort.
Over the past few weeks you’ve heard from a number of exceptional speakers about the importance of discovery and creativity in your PhD experience. In these final sessions, we will practice being creative through a series of design exercises and discussions that will allow each of you to better understand what your personal modes of creativity might be, and how to identify the constraints and assumptions on our thinking that get us in the way of being creative and asking the great questions that lead to discovery.

In this session, guest speaker Chris MacPherson ’08* will facilitate a series of interactive exercises where each of you can practice and understand the different ways you can be creative and conclude with a conversation on what is creativity?

Graduate students enrolled in the GradFUTURES Alumni Mentoring program are required to attend one of the mentee orientations, on either October 12 or October 25.

At the orientation, you will meet other graduate students in the mentoring program cohort, and learn, reflect and discuss on
- broad benefits of mentorship toward academic success, wellbeing and career development
- how best to leverage the alumni mentoring program for your development goals
- expectations of the mentoring program
- best practices of connecting, setting goals and cadence of the mentor-mentee relationship

GradFUTURES is pleased to launch “Shape your PhD”- an interdisciplinary learning cohort on Thursdays, Sep 22-Nov 10, 6-7.30 pm. This learning cohort, designed especially for G1 and G2 students, will involve active learning methods driving the direction of content. Over 6-7 sessions, join us to reimagine, explore and visualize a holistic PhD experience focused on your personal and professional growth.

This is the fourth session of Shape your PhD interdisciplinary learning cohort.
In this session, guest speaker Dr. Itai Yanai will discuss the creative thinking aspects of the research process that happens behind the scenes termed night science. Through What is the Question, Dr. Yanai outlines that a discovery is unexpected- an unknown unknown- and often does not fit neatly into a ‘knowledge gap’. A crucial step in many discoveries is the invention or the refocusing of the research question, and we will explore ways in which questions may be formulated or rephrased for research progress.

Pre-reading: What is the Question, Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher, Genome Biology


Bio:
Dr. Itai Yanai is the inaugural Director of the Institute for Computational Medicine and Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at NYU Langone School of Medicine. His research looks at dynamic biological processes through the lens of gene regulation. Using his training as an experimental embryologist, a molecular biologist, and an evolutionary and computational biologist, he is exploring how gene regulatory pathways are deployed at the molecular level. One of the goals of his research group is to make a comprehensive determination of gene expression in every cell in nematode C. elengans and computationally analyze this complete atlas to infer gene regulatory pathways.

Along with Dr. Martin Lercher, Dr. Yanai co-authored the popular science book The Society of Genes, which discusses how genes compete and cooperate in our genome. Also in collaboration with Dr. Lercher, Dr. Yanai discusses the exciting and significant parts of scientific research that occur behind the scenes, called “night science” and explores the creative side of scientific thinking in a collection of editorials in Genome Biology and associated podcasts.

Dr. Yanai earned PhD in Bioinformatics from Boston University and pursued postdoctoral training at Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and Harvard University. He served as Assistant and Associate Professor of Biology at Technion -Israel Institute of Technology between 2008-2016. In 2016, he joined NYU Langone Health.

Graduate students enrolled in the GradFUTURES Alumni Mentoring program are required to attend one of the mentee orientations, on either October 12 or October 25.

At the orientation, you will meet other graduate students in the mentoring program cohort, and learn, reflect and discuss on
- broad benefits of mentorship toward academic success, wellbeing and career development
- how best to leverage the alumni mentoring program for your development goals
- expectations of the mentoring program
- best practices of connecting, setting goals and cadence of the mentor-mentee relationship

Raise a glass to the first computer programmer! Co-sponsored by GradFUTURES and Graduate Student Government.

GradFUTURES is pleased to launch “Shape your PhD”- an interdisciplinary learning cohort on Thursdays, Sep 22-Nov 10, 6-7.30 pm. This learning cohort, designed especially for G1 and G2 students, will involve active learning methods driving the direction of content. Join us to reimagine, explore and visualize a holistic PhD experience focused on your personal and professional growth.

In total, there will be 6-7 sessions of this Learning Cohort.

Overview: A Ph.D. experience can include much more than disciplinary training and expertise. Although Ph.D. training primarily happens within departments, we encourage graduate students to connect with the vast social and intellectual ecosystem at Princeton’s campus for professional development. The broader campus provides rare access to people from different parts of the world who are motivated by a shared purpose and provide you with the tools and agency to shape your PhD in ways that align with your unique interests, prior experiences and future aspirations.

This is the third session of Shape your PhD interdisciplinary learning cohort. In this session, we’ll discuss the power of building improvised and systematic connections with researchers and thinkers from different disciplines. You will discuss your research interests and projects with someone from a different discipline, and you’ll hear about their own work. You’ll learn how to handle curious conversations with a non-specialist, and you’ll also likely stumble upon interesting questions or perspectives. The conversations will aid your understanding of how someone from a different discipline approaches research problems and how diverse perspectives can augment your thoughts and approaches.

GradFUTURES is pleased to launch “Shape your PhD”- an interdisciplinary learning cohort on Thursdays, Sep 22-Nov 10, 6-7.30 pm. This learning cohort, designed especially for G1 and G2 students, will involve active learning methods driving the direction of content. Join us to reimagine, explore and visualize a holistic PhD experience focused on your personal and professional growth. In total, there will be 6-7 sessions of this Learning Cohort.

Overview: A Ph.D. experience can include much more than disciplinary training and expertise. Although Ph.D. training primarily happens within departments, we encourage graduate students to connect with the vast social and intellectual ecosystem at Princeton’s campus for professional development. The broader campus provides rare access to people from different parts of the world who are motivated by a shared purpose and provide you with the tools and agency to shape your PhD in ways that align with your unique interests, prior experiences and future aspirations.

This is the second session of Shape your PhD interdisciplinary learning cohort, and we’ll center our discussion on the book Where Research Begins (Chicago UP, 2022), which tackles two challenges researchers face with every new project:

How do I find a compelling problem to investigate–"one that truly matters to me, deeply and personally?
How do I then design my research project so that the results will matter to anyone else?

Building on our discussion from week 1, we’ll connect our purpose to those of our disciplines, our scholarly communities, and the broader worlds beyond them.

In this session, we have the incredible opportunity to engage with Professors Thomas Mullaney and Christopher Rea, co-authors of Where Research Begins: Choosing a Research Project That Matters to You (and the World) (Chicago UP, 2022) (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo131341275.html).

THOMAS MULLANEY
https://history.stanford.edu/people/thomas-mullaney

Thomas S. Mullaney is Professor of History and Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, by courtesy. He is also the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress, and a Guggenheim Fellow.

He is the author or lead editor of 7 books, including The Chinese Typewriter (winner of the Fairbank prize), Your Computer is on Fire, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China, and the forthcoming The Chinese Computer–"the first comprehensive history of Chinese-language computing.

His writings have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, Technology & Culture, Aeon, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, and his work has been featured in the LA Times, The Atlantic, the BBC, and in invited lectures at Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and more. He holds a PhD from Columbia University.

CHRISTOPHER REA
https://asia.ubc.ca/profile/christopher-rea/

Christopher Rea is a literary and cultural historian whose research focuses on the modern Chinese-speaking world. My most recent publications concern research methods, cinema, comedy, celebrities, swindlers, cultural entrepreneurs, and the scholar-writers Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang. I am also a translator, including (with Bruce Rusk) of the Ming-dynasty work The Book of Swindles.

In 2022, University of Chicago Press published a book I co-authored with Tom Mullaney, Where Research Begins: Choosing a Research Project That Matters to You (and the World). Project website.

In 2011, Columbia University Press published my book Chinese Film Classics, 1922-1949. See the online course I created at chinesefilmclassics.org and a YouTube playlist of 27+ subtitled films and 22 video lectures.

Participants will receive a free copy of Where Research Begins: Choosing a Research Project That Matters to You (and the World) (Chicago UP, 2022).