Office of Postdoctoral Affairs

Self-knowledge is about knowing who you are and what matters to you. Knowing your true self will help you make choices in your professional development activities that integrate and align with your values, interests, preferences, and skills. The following offices offer programming relating to developing skills in self-knowledge.

• Graduate Mentoring Center
• Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning
• SupportLinc Employee Assistance Program

ImaginePhD (external resource) offers self-assessments related to interests, skills, and values. The Interests assessment will help you evaluate what career-related activities you enjoy doing most and those you would prefer to avoid. In the Skills assessment, you will consider some of the many skills you may already use and determine your level of experience and ability with each. Finally, the Values assessment will help you reflect upon what is important to you in order to have a satisfying work environment.

Career exploration is the clarifying and distilling of your own self-knowledge about work preferences and goals, an understanding of your technical and transferrable skills, a clear sense of the world of work and job prospects, and the ability to make informed decisions based on these elements. It is an important step in the transition to post-graduate work, regardless of the field or industry in which you aspire to work. Graduate students in all disciplines have a variety of career exploration resources, and career options, available to them. Career exploration resources encompass everything from strategies for clarifying your career goals to adapting your CV for opportunities inside and outside academia. We have outlined a number of resources below to aid in your own career exploration and encourage you to take advantage of as many of them as you can now to be prepared for your transition from student to professional. We have divided these resources into those that you will find in your academic unit and related to an academic job search, and those resources that you’ll find through campus career services and related to jobs and industries outside academia.

Career Center with the National Postdoctoral Association (use your IU email address to make an account)

Careers outside academia

• IU Career Services a hub connecting you to career centers in each school

Careers within academia

• check for resources within your program
• CIRTL@IUB
  • supports undergraduate education through the professional development of future faculty. The campus program is jointly led by the IUB Graduate Office and the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning. CIRTL@IUB acts as a virtual and in-person hub to connect graduate students and postdocs to online workshops, courses, and communities facilitated through the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning;
• Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning
  • Provides leadership and expertise to enable innovation in curricula, implementation of powerful technologies and pedagogies in and beyond the classroom, and student engagement with learning resources and materials to promote critical analytic and research skills.
• Preparing Future Faculty Conference
  • A one-day event designed to provide graduate students and postdocs from all disciplines and at all phases of their educations with important information about preparing for their future academic careers.

There are resources to support your academic, pedagogical, and scholarly communications.

• Scholarly Writing Program
  • The Scholarly Writing Program (SWP) supports faculty and postdocs as they write for publication. We aim to promote and share strong writing practices and build a community of writers on campus.
• Proposal Development Services
  • Collaborates with researchers to help plan, prepare, and manage applications for external funding.
• Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning
  • CITL provides leadership and expertise to enable innovation in curricula, implementation of powerful technologies and pedagogies in and beyond the classroom, and student engagement with learning resources and materials to promote critical analytic and research skills.
• Social Science Research Commons
  • SSRC providing research infrastructure, support, and training to social science faculty, postdocs and graduate students.
• Transforming your Research into Teaching (Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning/CIRTL@IUB)
  • Learn how to build a course out of your research specialty in this 7-week workshop series that guides grad students and postdocs through the fundamentals of course design. Trainees learn the skills of course design and apply these skills by building a full college course based on their area of research expertise.

The National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity (NCFDD) is an independent center dedicated to helping faculty successfully transition from graduate studies, achieve tenure, and, ultimately, become a full professor. IU Bloomington has an institutional membership in the NCFDD, providing all faculty, postdocs, and graduate students access to their basic program of services at no additional cost. These services include a weekly email, access to the NCFDD curriculum, and several other services.

The National Research Mentoring Network disseminates evidence-based practices to support effective mentoring relationships.

Several units on campus connect you with experts, methods, and technology and provide support to your scholarship:

• Scholars’ Commons IU Libraries
• Social Science Research Commons
• Institute for Digital Humanities
• University Information Technology Services

• The Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning offers workshops and consultations to faculty, postdocs, and graduate students.
• Transforming Your Research Into Teaching (a collaboration of the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning and CIRTL@IUB)
  • Learn how to build a course out of your research specialty in this 7-week workshop series that guides grad students and postdocs through the fundamentals of course design. Trainees learn the skills of course design and apply these skills by building a full college course based on their area of research expertise.