thoughts on a PhD development course, part 1

I am teaching a 1 credit hour PhD development course for industrial and systems engineering students at the University of Wisconsin Madison. I am teaching the course with librarian Ryan Schryver, who is using the course to replace his office hours that students never came to. He found that students were not asking the questions that they needed to ask. Additionally, the department has a goal of exposing students to research and people across the department, but we have found that our students work in their labs with few interactions with students in operations research, manufacturing, human factors, and/or healthcare (our four department areas).

This course will fill these gaps. Our syllabus includes a variety of topics for students in their first 2-3 years, from understanding department and university policies to choosing a dissertation topic, technical writing, graphics, research organization, good programming habits, and prelims. We have a bunch of guest speakers plus me. I love hearing my colleagues’ take on things.

Student feedback thus far has been fantastic. I have urged the students to take ownership, and they seem interested in getting what they need from this course, not just in attending to get credit.

My favorite day thus far has been the PhD student panel, where PhD students asked questions to other PhD students. The questions came from all over the place, and the panelists were open to being quite honest about the process and the occasional struggles. Ryan and I knew it was successful when we had those unfiltered moments. Here are a few tweets from the panel.

Our guest speaker from the writing center, had some really good advice about the writing process:

Ryan talked about copyright and fair use, and he filled his talk with many pieces of useful information:

I’ll have a recap slide on this course at the end of the semester. In the mean time, please share advice and observations from similar courses you have taken so I can revise and improve the experience.

Related posts:

• Should you do a PhD?
• Despite what you’ve heard, getting a STEM PhD is still a good idea: Part 1 and Part 2
• how to choose a good academic family