Professional development is integral to graduate education at Princeton University. It involves the systematic learning, acquisition, and application of skills and competencies that support your scholarly goals while preparing you for professional success in diverse roles within the academic, government, nonprofit, and private sectors. These competencies are in-demand in the Ph.D. labor market across all disciplines, career fields, and position types. Many are also interrelated and may be explored in any order based on your unique interests and goals. Throughout your time here, a range of programs helps you build competence and confidence in each of these highly transferable skills. Our Professional Competency Model Research & Data Analysis Writing & Public Speaking Teaching & Mentoring Leadership & Collaboration Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Personal Well-being & Effectiveness Innovation & Entrepreneurship Career Management Progressive Acquisition & Mastery of Skills Creates Career Optionality Alongside the development of strong foundational and discipline-specific skills, we emphasize distinguishing skills that translate universally across an array of leadership environments. This sets our Ph.D.s apart on the academic job market and prepares them for success in diverse fields—including entrepreneurship. We curate, integrate, and cross-promote professional development programs offered by dozens of partners on and off campus to help graduate students build and hone these skills. In addition, we deliver more than 150+ programs including skill-building, interdisciplinary learning cohorts, mentorship, and experiential opportunities. Learn more about our professional competency model. “I always imagine I'm a tree and different skills are branches and leaves that could grow in the future. My professional development is a process of knowing myself and the world, and growing those branches and leaves. Connecting with alumni in my department opened my eyes to the career choices I could have as an EEB PhD and what skillsets I could aim to develop during graduate school. By doing what I want to try, I learn what I'm passionate about and what skills I'm already good at and what skills I'd need to learn more.” –Qiqi Yang, GS, EEB “Many brilliant people apply to graduate school and then find that graduate school is not quite what they expected. Rather than being a retreat from the world, it is in fact a training ground for a complicated, very public job, one that requires many of the same skills as other high level positions. These include networking, scheduling time efficiently, managing multiple forms of technology, following a plethora of policies, and leading people from diverse backgrounds to accomplish a common goal while simultaneously writing, researching, and teaching. Fortunately, the graduate student professional development program at Princeton University provides training in just these types of skills and thus is an essential part of graduate student success now and in the future." –Wendy Laura Belcher, Professor of African Literature, Princeton University, Department of Comparative Literature and Department of African American Studies
