“Designing Your Life”: Working Group Exercise for Exploring Imagine PhD
We asked everyone who attended our first workshop to do the following:
- Go through the “Design Your Life” career worksheet (see below)
- Create an “Imagine PhD” account and explore the site and its resources. (The degree to which you explore the site is up to you! However, you will likely get the most out of the session if you complete at least one of the core assessments (Interests, Skills, or Values) and briefly check out some of the suggested “Job Families.”)
- Select three different non-academic job areas/titles and find a job ad that corresponds to each job area/title (on Google Jobs, Indeed, LinkedIn, etc.–the search engine is up to you). Plan to bring your three job ads to our session–we’ll try to go through a few to learn how to identify key phrases/skills and translate our academic experiences so that they speak to relevant hiring committees
Our session was structured in two parts. In the first parts, we discussed the experiences we had filling out the career worksheet (below) and exploring the Imagine PhD site. Second, we looked at the job ads we found and discussed techniques for writing resumes and cover letters that spoke to those jobs. (Note sent to participants: If you’d like to get a head start on this latter portion of the session, try to write a resume/letter based on one of the job ads you’ve found and bring any results, specific questions, or difficulties you’ve encountered to our discussion!)
Working PhDs 