Margaret Newhouse. Photo by Martha Stewart. Garth McCavana Terry Aladjem

At an Office of Career Services' seminar devoted to offering tips on finding a job in academia, a student equated her experience at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) to climbing Mount Everest -- a Mount Everest that is perpetually growing. So it seems with professional development in academia. The path is neither clear nor simple. Departmental and bureaucratic requirements, fellowship applications, teaching obligations, postdoctoral positions, and the prospect of looking for a job all add up to a winding, obstacle-ridden trail of professional demands.

For this reason, the GSAS Office of Student Affairs, the Office of Career Services (OCS), and the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning collaborated last spring to develop materials that help define professional development and offer graduate students a blueprint for progress. The resulting booklet, titled Professional Development Begins Today, highlights services provided to graduate students by each of the three offices, and provides a timeline to assist students in identifying and maintaining progress in their own development.

"Professional development isn't something you start working on when you finish the dissertation," says Garth McCavana, GSAS assistant dean of student affairs. "You really have to start the day you arrive. That's how the most successful students at the Graduate School have gotten through." Adds Cynthia Verba, director of fellowships, "I feel that those of us who work with students on scholarly issues and professional development outside of the departments make it possible for faculty members and students to interact with one another in a more productive way."

Scholarly Strengths and Interests

According to Verba, this interaction between students and faculty best flourishes when students perceive themselves as professionals and have a realistic sense of their scholarly skills and goals. "In all of my counseling with graduate students, whether they are in the early or final stages of their work," Verba says, "I try to help them recognize and articulate their own scholarly strengths and interests. Once students feel confident in defining themselves seriously as scholars, it sets off a chain reaction and others respond to them in kind."

To illustrate her point, Verba describes a graduate student whose development she has watched over the years. The student, who was very successful in obtaining fellowship support, had, not surprisingly, put together an impressive research project. Verba could recognize not only the student's progress, but also the excellent faculty advising that had contributed to that progress. "When I asked what she had done to gain such outstanding advising, her answer seemed so simple and obvious," Verba says. "She sought the advice of all professors who had some expertise on the subject, not just the one or two closest to her field. She said she got the most out of these advising sessions when she herself came well prepared with questions to ask or progress to report.

"Beyond this," Verba continues, "she said that seeking the additional perspective of someone outside of her discipline helped to assure that she was articulating her project clearly enough to persuade even a nonspecialist that it was worthy of support." Having watched this student's professional growth over the years, Verba concludes, "I cannot say how and when her professional sense of self took flight, but the person I was now looking at was truly a professional scholar."

Articulating scholarly strengths and interests involves not only successfully meeting departmental requirements, but also assessing one's research and writing skills, defining one's scholarly work in a way that is worthwhile and feasible, and (if a faculty position is the ultimate goal) developing successful teaching skills. According to McCavana, thinking in terms of professional development gives proper focus to the necessity of these skills. "We hope students will realize that while pursuing the deepening knowledge in a given field, there are day-to-day things that can be done for forward motion," he says. "It's difficult and frightening to think that big sometimes, but learning to define where you are going and then acquiring the skills to get there can make a real difference."

No One Way

"There is no one way to do this," says Mary-Ann Winkelmes, associate director at the Bok Center, when talking about prescribed strategies for professional development. "In fact," she adds, "there are probably as many ways as there are graduate students." Terry Aladjem, also associate director at the Bok Center and lecturer in social studies, comments, "In my own experience as a graduate student, I was always frustrated by how disparate the services were that had anything to do with the profession. We would like this experience to become more integrated at Harvard."

One part of this integration involves developing stronger ties among the various offices that deal with professional development. Another, according to Aladjem, "involves integrating teaching training with scholarly work in a way that makes both more effective." Both Aladjem and Winkelmes say that graduates may well spend half of their time during campus job interviews talking about teaching and the other half talking about their research. "Anyone who has reflected on their own teaching experience is going to do better in these interviews than someone who hasn't," says Winkelmes.

Developing professional teaching skills and a teaching portfolio, then, is integral to the graduate experience and to one's professional development. "In our travels to other institutions, I've found that concerns about teaching have increased substantially," Aladjem says. "We have a responsibility to train people to do well in that market. But we also want to underscore and legitimize the idea of exploration. If students want to go on to research institutions or smaller colleges, that should be part of the conversation with the their faculty advisors. If they ultimately wish to apply the skills and knowledge they've acquired to a job outside of the academy, that too will be supported by the efforts of our three offices."

Imperative to the forward thinking involved in professional development is having a sense of where one is going and a willingness to explore possibilities. Says Margaret Newhouse, assistant director at OCS, "When students come to me for counseling, I'll often ask them if they've considered alternatives, even if they're coming in for academic career counseling. I think it helps to open up their thinking. Of course, we are aware that the primary mission of the Graduate School is to train academics and that there are trade-offs between time spent on one's professional development outside of traditional avenues. In the end, this is a delicate and very individual balance."

Understanding each student's scholarly and professional goals is what GSAS, OCS, and the Bok Center are all about. "Each student has to take the primary role in steering themselves," McCavana says, "but our collaboration has helped us to improve the integration of our services so that graduate students can think of our offices as part of the same fabric."