PhD Professional Development Pathways Platform

Project Description

The PhD Professional Development Pathways Platform is a project to create an online digital-badge tracking platform and dashboard that will allow BU doctoral students to track their development of skills and their achievement of learning goals connected to six core capacities. Through the acquisition of digital badges connected to activities and assessments recorded on the platform, doctoral students at BU will be able to monitor their progress through various learning pathways, share benchmarks in their individual development plans, and develop a practice of career planning and lifelong learning. Each badge is assessed and issued according to completion of specific tasks and learning pathways. The online dashboard allows students to organize, download, and share to other virtual platforms a summary of their achievements, providing a portfolio piece for job applications.

The objective of employing a digital platform for tracking the core capacities is to provide students, departments, faculty, and administrators with a method of assessing student progress through the professional development curriculum, enabling the community that supports doctoral student education to evaluate the use and value of the core capacities themselves. In addition, such a platform provides students with a means of staying accountable for measuring their own progress, while also creating a method for translating achievements from their doctoral programs into their lives beyond academia. We are piloting the platform with the PhD students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GRS) due to its large number of students and the diversity of PhD programs across the natural sciences, humanities and social sciences within GRS, which will provide a good cross-section of the doctoral student population.

Project Team

Sasha B. Goldman, PhD

Sasha B. Goldman is the Program Manager for PhD Professional Development where she is responsible for designing a new curriculum for doctoral student professional development at BU. Sasha is tasked with developing and coordinating regular programming, workshops, and trainings for current doctoral students in areas of project management, writing and communication, teaching, and career planning. Sasha also produces the Vitamin PhD podcast, a unique resource providing career and professional development advice and resources for doctoral students at BU and beyond.

Sasha joined the Professional Development & Postdoctoral Affairs team in the spring of 2020, after completing her PhD in the History of Art & Architecture at Boston University. As a doctoral student at BU Sasha served in leadership roles for several committees and boards at the University, college, and department levels including the Graduate Student Advisory Council for the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and the Graduate & Professional Leadership Council. She has received several awards and grants for her research in the field of contemporary Italian art history and is currently working on a manuscript of her first book on artist Maurizio Cattelan. Sasha also holds a BA from Connecticut College and an MA from Temple University, both in Art History.

Sarah Hokanson, PhD

Sarah is responsible for postdoctoral affairs, professional development programming and resources for doctoral students and postdocs across the University, as well as supporting the development of University policies related to postdoctoral scholarship. She also provides resources for faculty mentors and PIs applying for grants related to doctoral and postdoctoral training. Sarah is the multi-PI of the Postdoc Academy, a $1.8m NIH project focused on providing digital and in-person professional development opportunities for postdocs nationwide. She is co-PI of an NSF AGEP Alliance (CIRTL AGEP) focused on improving the research climate for graduate students and postdocs, and is co-Director of the Workforce Development Core within Boston University’s NSF Engineering Research Center (CELL-MET). Sarah serves in leadership positions nationally, including most recently on the AAMC Postdoctoral Leaders Steering Committee.

Prior to joining Boston University, Sarah was US Deputy Director of Science and Innovation at the British Consulate-General, Boston. Sarah holds a BA in Chemistry from Boston University and a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics from the University Of Pennsylvania School Of Medicine. Sarah’s graduate research was supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, and she completed a NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell University in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. She received an Executive Education Certificate from MIT Sloan School of Management’s Entrepreneurship Development Program in 2014.

Dena Rezaei, PhD

Dena is a Postdoctoral Research Associate for PhD Professional Development. In her role, she collaborates with the PDPA team to develop, implement, research, and evaluate the doctoral professional development curriculum and online learning pathways. Before joining BU, she served as a Research Associate for the CU-Boulder Center for STEM Learning, supporting and promoting campus-wide educational transformation efforts toward improving teaching quality.

Her research interests focus on using technological advancements such as social media in learning and knowledge sharing, diversity, inclusion, and equity in both higher education and corporation settings. An important goal of her research is to contribute to the knowledge set of educational systems, and to provide suggestions to organizations on how to design and implement ethical, innovative, and effective teaching and learning practices to gain competitive and sustainable advantages.

Dena earned her B.S. in Engineering (2006) and her Master’s (2014) and Ph.D. (2018) in Educational Administration and Human Development from Texas A&M University.

Project Partners

Badgr

Organizations around the world use Badgr to create branded learning ecosystems that support their communities with skills-based digital credentials, stackable learning pathways, and portable learner records.

As with all students, doctoral students need specific career skills in addition to their academic mastery. Professional Development & Postdoctoral Affairs (PDPA) recognized the value of digital badges as a medium to track progress along pathways to those career competencies. Badges provide rich, skills-aligned data sets that are portable, shareable, stackable, and trackable. Pathways lets PDPA stack critical elements together into a comprehensive program of career preparation and track students’ progress. Doctoral students can monitor their own progress along those visual, badge-driven Pathways to ensure they’ve acquired the critical competencies that will support their career success. Learn more about Badgr.