Worried about what you’ll do after you graduate? The Graduate Studies (GS) is now offering limited one-on-one career planning consultations.
Karim in his office
Karim Abuawad has been hired to meet with graduate students individually to discuss their skills, qualifications, interests, and goals in order to help them plot their career narratives. Abuawad will guide participating students through the creation of an Individual Development Plan (IDP) in order to facilitate realistic self-evaluation and goal setting.
This new program goes hand-in-hand with initiatives that have already been put in place to help grad students develop their writing skills. Abuawad offers individual writing support, facilitates writing retreats and helps students deal with any challenges they face as they plan and write their theses and dissertations.
Graduate Registrar Joanne Bree and David Lafferty, Graduate Studies’s Professional Graduate Development Coordinator, realized that more is needed to be done to help grad students plan for their futures.
To kick things off, Abuawad and Lafferty have scheduled an IDP workshop where they will talk about professional development and the importance of establishing a “career narrative”. Students will then begin work on creating their own IDPs and book appointments for individual follow-up sessions. The organizers plan on holding an IDP workshop every month.
Abuawad points out that finding work is a personal process that utilizes peoples’ own networks of friends, family, professors, and other contacts.
Explains Abuawad: “As part of their Individual Development Plan, we may, for example, encourage students to develop their missing skills through available workshops or by taking advantage of opportunities they have identified. We may encourage them to expand their personal networks by scheduling informational interviews, or to develop their knowledge of the job market through targeted research. Each graduate student is in a unique situation. Thus, there is a need for personalized and flexible approaches.”
Moving forward, Lafferty and Abuawad also plan to schedule more workshops and panels on working outside of academia, including some featuring successful alumni like those featured in Graduate Studies’s Navigating the Job Market interviews.
Abuawad’s experience in higher education spans a decade over three continents. He has performed various roles at institutions in North America, the Middle East and in Europe—roles ranging from teaching, curriculum development, administrative duties to research. Prior to coming to Carleton, he taught courses on literature, writing and research. He earned a BA and an MA from the University of Illinois and a PhD in comparative literature from Western University in London, Ontario.
Lafferty points out that Graduate Studies’s new services will compliment resources already offered by Career Services.
David Lafferty
In his four years with Graduate Studies, Lafferty has continued to develop Grad Navigate, a suite of professional development workshops offered by services across campus that cover such areas as research and writing, mental wellness, teaching skills, and career planning, and he has expanded the writing support resources offered for students working on theses and dissertations. As part of his portfolio, Lafferty also organizes the annual Three Minute Thesis competition in which grad students talk about their research in three minutes or less, while vying for prizes. See the professional development website at carleton.ca/gradpd for more on what Graduate Studies offers.
Lafferty earned his Master of Arts in English (2002) and PhD in Cultural Mediations (2009) at Carleton.
