Graduate Student-Run Course Framework for Comprehensive Professional Development

Comprehensive professional development is rarely offered to graduate students, yet would assist students to obtain employment and prosper in their careers. Our objective was to design a course framework to provide professional development training to graduate students that is comprehensive, minimizes faculty workload, and provides enculturation into a single scientific discipline. The course framework is participant-run with faculty facilitation. A pilot course was offered at the University of Maryland College Park in 2004 with eight participants using discussion, writing, reading, and peer-to-peer review methods. The course covered a breadth of professional development subjects with technical writing, manuscript writing, and job search prioritized. Mean participant rating of the overall course was 4.8 (out of 5). Faculty workload was successfully minimized. Discipline enculturation was included in most discussions and readings. We propose that education in a subject be divided into foundation-level and competency-level training. Foundation-level training includes fundamental knowledge and resource awareness. Competency-level training includes the abilities to perform at a level sufficient to obtain and maintain employment and to accurately evaluate the performance of others. Course weaknesses included poor coverage of some fundamentals, some missed deadlines, and variable quality of reviews. These weaknesses may be resolved with improved discipline-specific materials, deadline-based grading, review rubrics, quantitative knowledge assessment and evaluation, and external review for competency-level training. This course framework has potential to offer comprehensive foundation-level training and selective competency-level training to graduate students.