To:First-year and Second Year Ph.D. students
From:Julie Horney
Re:Plans of study
A plan of study, as the attached guidelines indicate, is a written projection of your professional goals and objectives, along with some practical plans for attaining your objectives in and through graduate study here. Preparing your plan of study should prompt you to explore your options and opportunities, to recognize the need to direct your efforts toward programmatic and personal milestones, and ask questions (of your advisor and others) about how best to negotiate the path toward the Ph.D.
Please read the attached guidelines carefully. You should plan on drafting your plan of study and sharing it with your advisor when you meet with him or her.
The graduate student handbook requires first year doctoral students to file their plan of study with their advisors and discuss their plans in December of their first year. It requires second year doctoral students to submit a revised plan with advisors in December of their second year.
In the case of second year students, please feel free to utilize any sections of your recently submitted Student Progress Report in revising your plan. However, please note that the progress report is a statement of what you did accomplish last year. The Plan, in contrast, is a proposal about what you will accomplish in the future.
Guidelines for Developing a Plan of Doctoral Study
Each student’s graduate education follows a unique path, but students have common interests and goals in developing substantive expertise, research skills, and teaching experience. Achieving these goals requires some planning, some initiative, and attentiveness to opportunities as they arise. Developing your plan should be an impetus to clarify your professional goals and objectives and to learn more about how they can be achieved.
Your plan of study should serve as a practical guide to choices that you will be making as a doctoral student, although it should not confine you. It is quite possible that the thought that you put into your plan of study will lead you to ask questions of others (faculty, classmates), and to recognize that you have some questions that only you yourself can answer. Further, your thinking may lead you to doubt what appears to be conventional wisdom about how to succeed in graduate school and beyond. Your plan is not a formal contract with yourself or anyone else; it is an agenda, subject to revision, for getting as much out of the program as you can.
In writing your plan of study you should:
- identify career goals, and state any questions you would like to have answered about career choices;
- describe the skills, knowledge, experiences, and achievements that you believe would enable you to obtain (and succeed in) your first job;
·consider barriers or challenges that you might face (and how to overcome them);
·identify substantive questions and topics that you are interested in researching, and the curriculum fields (and/or specific coursework) that you think are relevant to those topics;
- identify the kinds of professional experiences that you would like to have in the next two years, and how they would contribute to your medium- and long-term goals of completing the degree and beginning your career (research? teaching? work with specific projects or faculty members? coursework in other departments?).
Your plan should be no longer than two or three pages. You have already begun thinking about these questions; now it is time to find some of the answers. If your written plan cannot resolve some of the above issues, don’t be concerned, but recognize that eventually you–and not chance–should be responsible for the decisions.
You should give a copy of your plan to your advisor, for comments and feedback.