Home
Funding & Professional Development
Professional Development

Professional Development

Graduate and postdoctoral professional development

Indiana University Bloomington offers graduate students and postdoctoral scholars resources and programs to support their professional development. Utilizing these supports will help you make the most of your time here, engage with people outside your program, expand your knowledge and skills, and prepare for your career.

In the Graduate School, we organize distinctive programs that advance professional skills in research and teaching and that connect you with colleagues across the state, across the continent, and around the world.

Future Faculty Teaching Fellowship

Advanced Ph.D. and M.F.A. students observe and experience faculty responsibilities and faculty life at a variety of academic institutions. Fellows teach a full academic year at campuses throughout Indiana.

CIRTL@IUB

Graduate students and postdoctoral scholars develop skills that help them see teaching as a dynamic and ongoing process aimed at understanding and improving student learning.

Three Minute Thesis

The competition challenges master’s and doctoral students to present a compelling oration on their thesis or dissertation research and its significance to a general audience in just three minutes.

Graduate Career Diversity Symposium

Focusing on different professional development topics from year to year, the GCDS is an annual fall event that dynamically explores topics relevant to graduate career development.

Professional development partnerships at IU

Throughout your time at IU, it is important to reflect on how each experience and opportunity you pursue fits into your own personal goals, objectives, and programmatic needs. Below is a grid with broad competencies all graduates and postdocs ought to develop, representative skills within each competency, and resources available to support the development of those skills.

Development Resources
Competency	Skills	Programs/Resources
Self-Knowledge	Expressing Professional Self-Identity, Maintaining Wellness and Work-Life Balance: 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.	Graduate Mentoring Center Counseling and Psychological Services Graduate Career Coaching Advocates and Allies for Equity
Career Exploration	Career exploration is the clarifying and distilling of your own self-knowledge about work preferences and goals, an understanding of your technical and transferable 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 Career Coaching Preparing Future Faculty Conference Graduate Career Diversity Symposium Future Faculty Teaching Fellowship ImaginePhD
Communication	In addition to representing yourself within your discipline, it is important to develop skills in reaching broad audiences of students, colleagues, future employers, and even the general public to share in your research and engage in dialogue.	Writing Tutorial Services Social Science Research Commons GradGrants Center Three Minute Thesis Writing Groups
Research and Data Analysis	Data-driven decision-making is found in nearly every sector of every industry, and regardless of your discipline, multiple units on campus can connect you with experts, methods, and technology to support your training and scholarship.	IU Libraries Scholars' Commons Social Science Research Commons Institutional Analytics
Leadership and Teaching	Graduate students might have a part-time academic appointment as an associate instructor, engaging in activities typical of a teacher. An Associate Instructor assigns grades for at least a portion of a course and has direct contact with students. Typical activities include lecturing, tutoring, and laboratory instruction. All of these activities, as well as the development of strong mentoring skills, can serve graduates well both within and beyond academic career pathways.	Associate Instructor Orientation Classroom Climate Workshop Transforming Your Research into Teaching Graduate Teaching Apprenticeship Program Future Faculty Teaching Fellowship Graduate and Professional Student Government