As a graduate student with daily responsibilities related to researching, teaching, and service activities, you can easily lose track of time and lose sight of your long-term goals. For example, you will be busy with a lab write-up that is due in a few days, preparing for an undergraduate course discussion section for tomorrow, and coordinating an event for an organization in which you belong. Each week, you will have impending assignments, meetings, and deadlines that require your immediate attention, and before you know it, the quarter will end. So what about those long-term goals?
One way to help ensure that you make steady progress towards your degree and goals is to create an independent development plan (IDP). The IDP is a useful tool for cultivating a successful graduate student experience in which you devise a plan for receiving proper training in your field, developing a career path, and building experiences that will help you reach your career goals. With an IDP, you will have a tangible set of goals and defined ways of achieving them. I am sure that this is a better game plan than having a nebulous idea of what you might want to do and how you might want to do it.
To successfully kick-off your graduate student experience, plan your IDP in the beginning of the academic year. That way, you start with clear goals. Moreover, prepare your IDP and review it with your mentor, advisor, or PI instead of working on it independently. Together, you will discuss both short-term and long-term objectives along with the type of skills that you need to develop and activities that you need to be involved in for meeting those objectives. Relevant skills may include new coding skills, new analytical methods, and novel teaching approaches. Activities may include attending key workshops and conferences in your field, applying to grants and fellowships within a certain timeframe, and publishing in a timely manner.
I suggest that you revisit your IDP every year. The process of reviewing and updating the IDP each year encourages you to assess where you stand currently, how much progress you made since the last time you established your goals, and include new ways to further your objectives.
For more information about the IDP at UCI, check out the following links:
http://sites.bio.uci.edu/school-and-graduate-division-resources/individual-development-plan/
Julie KimHome Country: U.S. / South KoreaSchool of Social Sciences
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