Shape Your Ph.D Session 1

Your PhD experience encompasses much more than disciplinary training and expertise. Although PhD training primarily happens within departments, we encourage you to connect with the vast social and intellectual ecosystem at Princeton’s campus for professional development. Why? The broader campus provides rare access to people from different parts of the world who are motivated by a shared purpose: the pursuit of knowledge, creativity and critical thinking. Princeton’s expansive ecosystem (and the connections you can make here!) can provide you with the tools and agency to shape your PhD in ways that are aligned with your interests, informed by your experiences, and geared to equip you for multiple futures.

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 discuss the various mental blocks that get in the way of being creative and how identifying, and lifting those constraints, can lead to better ideas. We will conclude with discussion on how (and when) we might apply creativity to PhD experience.

The formal scientific method tells you how to rigorously and objectively test a hypothesis. But where do hypotheses come from in the first place? Posing fruitful new questions, having ideas for novel hypotheses, all require creativity. Itai Yanai (NYU) and Martin Lercher (Dusseldorf University) have been exploring this hidden side of the scientific process in ‘Night Science’ Initiative.

In this workshop, we will discuss one creative thinking tool ‘Improvisation’. Borrowing concepts from improvisational theater - including the "yes, and" rule - we discuss the mechanics of 'talking research' and explore the creative powers unlocked through discussing ideas with colleagues, highlighting the roles of encouragement and a suspension of criticism.

This is the third session of Shape your PhD interdisciplinary learning cohort. The first two weeks featured a number of exceptional speakers who spoke 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?

Your PhD experience encompasses much more than disciplinary training and expertise. Although PhD training primarily happens within departments, we encourage you to connect with the vast social and intellectual ecosystem at Princeton’s campus for professional development. Why? The broader campus provides rare access to people from different parts of the world who are motivated by a shared purpose: the pursuit of knowledge, creativity and critical thinking. Princeton’s expansive ecosystem (and the connections you can make here!) can provide you with the tools and agency to shape your PhD in ways that are aligned with your interests, informed by your experiences, and geared to equip you for multiple futures.

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 Professor Thomas Mullaney, co-author 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.