New grant focuses on graduate student paths outside academia

The Graduate School has announced a program to provide funding for developing students' futures outside academia.

The new Professional Development Grant will give graduate students or departments up to $2,000 for programming related to professional growth, according to a Duke News release. The grant will allow individual students and departments to be specifically targeted for resources in a way they currently are not, Melissa Bostrom, assistant dean for for graduate professional development at the Graduate School, noted in the release.

“The Graduate School has more than 70 academic programs that run the gamut from art history to biomedical engineering,” Bostrom said in the Duke News release. “So while we organize many professional development opportunities, most of them have to be applicable across disciplines..... However, we also need to tackle topics that may be relevant only to students in one particular discipline but are very important to those students. So we created the Professional Development Grant to help meet that need.”

Proposals for the grant must include programming specifically targeted at careers outside of academia. Duke's graduate students are becoming increasingly interested in exploring opportunities in fields other than academics, Bostrom said—a pathway once considered outside the norm for doctoral students. The Professional Development grant will help the Graduate School to support this growing sector of students.

“Although many departments and programs already provide support for students seeking a tenure-track faculty position, increasingly, our students are interested in exploring career opportunities beyond the traditional path,” Bostrom said in the release. “At The Graduate School, we want to support both, and this grant provides funding to serve the interests of all our students.”

A pilot version of the grant program ran this Spring, when the history department held a panel discussion about nonacademic opportunities for doctoral students in the humanities.

The grant proposal process itself will serve to hone students' professional skills, the release noted. The experience students gain through writing the proposal, collaborating within their department and managing the project can all be useful for careers outside of academia, Bostrom said.

"In our experience, students often have innovative ideas for professional development programming," Bostrom said in the release. "So we want to help them bring those ideas to fruition."