Harvard SEAS Professional Development Seminar

Harvard SEAS Professional Development Seminar Series

Fall 2009

School of Engineering and Applied Science
Harvard University

About :: Seminar Schedule :: Resources :: Teaching :: Contact

Thursdays, noon to 1pm in Pierce 307

A weekly seminar on topics related to professional development for all graduate students and post-docs in SEAS. Lunch will be provided. If you'd like to be get email announcements of the week's speaker, email Victor.

Schedule

Date	Speaker(s)	Topic	Resources
9/24/09	Margo Seltzer	What is professional development and why should I care? Margo will talk about professional development, and then we'll discuss the suggested topics for the seminar series and get your input on topics you'd like to see covered.	slides
10/01/09	Greg Morrisett	Professor Morrisett will talk about the 'Top 10 things I did right or wrong in grad school'	slides notes
10/8/09	Scott Norris, Bor-rong Chen, and Yi-wen Huang	Having a family while in graduate school. How to cope when you get to the point of having a family, and how to prepare in the meantime.	slides
10/13/09	Special session organized by Haoqi Zhang	Applying for graduate fellowships (and winning): A discussion panel of NSF and NDSEG winners from SEAS We will give a short presentation of the fellowships and resources available to you and a few major tips, and then turn the floor over to a panel of past fellowship winners who will talk about their own experiences and answer your questions. Time: Tuesday, October 13th at 4:00pm Place: Maxwell Dworkin G115 Sample essays: Anyone interested can contact Haoqi for additional sample essays.	Presentation Panel contacts List of 2009 Fellowships
10/15/09	Jim Waldo	Life in industry Jim will talk about what jobs outside academia are like, and how to go about getting one.	slides
10/22/09	Stephen Chong	The Care and Feeding of Advisors The talk will be about communication with your advisor, understanding management styles, and setting expectations	slides
10/29/09	Harry Lewis	Committees, Deanships, Administration Harry will lead a discussion about the non-teaching and non-research parts of academic life: being asked to be on committees, being a dean or department chair, writing books, and how one can manage to say "no" occassionally.	Brief notes
11/5/09	Cherry Murray	Research Ethics Cherry will lead a discussion about what research ethics are, and why they are important.	slides
11/12/09	Rob Howe and Vinny Manoharan	Networking, Mentors, etc Rob and Vinny will lead a discussion on how to build and maintain a network of professional contacts, including tips for getting the most out of conferences and finding mentors.
11/19/09	Michael Rutter and Steve Bradt	Media relations and promotion Michael and Steve are in charge of communications at SEAS, and will talk about how to best promote your research and deal with the press.
11/26/09		No meeting--Thanksgiving!
12/3/09	Gu-Yeon Wei, Dave Weitz, and [NIH expert]	Getting funding This will be a panel style session about getting funding in academia: government and industry funding sources, writing grant proposals, etc.
12/10/09	Dan Needleman and David Parkes	Succeeding in the academic job search. Dan and David will talk about their experience both in applying for academic jobs and in being on the hiring side.
12/17/09		Wrapup We'll talk about what sessions people liked, and come up with topics that should be covered next time.

Schedule and slides from the Spring 2009 Professional Development Seminar

Suggested topics for rest of the semester (topics and dates subject to change):

Date	Speaker	Topic	Resources
	Stuart Shieber	Intellectual property rights and open access to the scholarly literature.

Other suggested topics include starting companies, collaboration, paper reading, getting tenure, and time management. It is likely that we won't be able to fit these topics into this year's schedule, but if there is a particular topic you'd really like us to do, let us know and maybe we can swap it for one of the topics above. There is also always next year!

Resources

The Office of Career Services has many resources and seminars related to career and professional development for both academic and non-academic careers. We highly encourage you to use this as a complement to SEAS's own offerings!

See a Google calendar of their Fall 2009 program schedule.
Join their LISTSERVS just for grad students, one on academic and one on nonacademic careers. They send out job postings, reminders of OCS programs, and announcements of other career events and information
Check out their website, http://www.ocs.fas.harvard.edu, especially the section specifically for graduate students.
If you'd like to discuss your career questions with a GSAS specialist, drop by OCS any Monday 1:00-4:00pm for their scheduled drop-ins, or call OCS (5-2595) to schedule an appointment.
HBS has a cool elevator pitch builder.

The Bureau of Study Counsel is a center for academic and personal development. They host numerous workshops and discussion groups, as well as many self-help resources on a large variety of topics. Take a look around their website!

Teaching

SEAS offers a Teaching Practicum course (CS365) for all graduate students. This year it will be taught spring semester.
The Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning offers many resources on teaching.
You should feel free to contact the department TF (Victor Shnayder, shnayder at eecs.harvard.edu) if you'd like to talk about teaching or have any questions.

Contact

If you have any questions or would like to be added to a mailing list for weekly meeting reminders, please contact Victor Shnayder, shnayder at eecs.harvard.edu.