Speaker 1: One of the things that's pretty exciting about working with the faculty here at ASU is that they're always looking for ways to become better mentors themselves. They know that an important part of their job is to be a mentor to graduate students and they're working together to try to learn how to become better mentors. We recognize that in a fast-paced changing world, new ways of doing Ph.D. mentoring is an absolute necessity to be able to solve complex world problems. So we're always looking at ways to improve grad Ph.D. training to serve our faculty and students of today.

Speaker 2: So network is clearly very important regardless of your employment, regardless of where you're going to end up. And so in an academic setting, we're used to networking with our direct colleagues, say fellow professors, fellow graduate students, fellow researchers, fellow students, and so forth. But in the outside world, outside of academia, so what is the best way to network? So I think it's very important to get out there, to make yourself known to the professional community. And one way to do that is through professional organizations.

Speaker 3: For me, the best networking for my students has always been former students. Former students are gainfully employed in academic as well as industrial settings. And they can share those opportunities with up-and-coming students.

Speaker 4: It turns out we all know people who are not in academia, we just don't always think about it. It turns out my next-door neighbor does environmental assessments for the city of Phoenix. So if a student is interested in sort of environmental stuff, I probably could call him and say, hey, would you talk to my student who's looking for a job? So it's the sort of thing where you have to just keep your ears open and remember who you've met in various places.

Speaker 3: With communication, you just have to find that right blend of authority and compassion when working with graduate students. Because we don't know what's going on in an individual's life. So that's why it's important to be honest with them and always engaging, whether it's just a little bit of engagement or sometimes there'll be a lot of engagement. The important thing is to have some engagement.

Speaker 5: By using writing, and this is often kind of note-taking from one meeting to the next and developing agendas and minutes, it's really mundane writing. But by showing other stakeholders who are part of our collaborations the progress we're making as a team through the writing that the graduate students and I are doing, we're doing a couple things. One, showing our capacity to help scaffold that problem-solving process, even when or especially when things might be especially charged, and developing outcomes that are really valuable because they've attended to the complexity, the dynamism of those ongoing conversations.

Speaker 6: It's important to have honest conversations with students about what possible paths they might be pursuing and where you could imagine them fitting. Allowing them a range of possibilities, but then being straightforward about these are the possible options that you see as well.

Speaker 4: I spend a lot of time having my senior graduate students mentoring younger students, whether they're undergrads or new graduate students. And what they don't realize is that that actually ends up looking like supervisory experience when they go to apply for jobs because they have, you know, worked with an employee or mentored a younger student, and that kind of stuff translates to the skill sets that people are looking for anywhere.

Speaker 6: One of the better resources I've found is ImaginePhD. It's a really strong resource because it allows the student to take a very quick assessment test. There are types of interests they might have in careers outside of a university setting. It then gives them families of jobs or groups of jobs, gives sample jobs, job descriptions, example applications, example resumes, and oftentimes videos as well. So it's as finely granulated as you want to go in pursuing other types of careers.

Speaker 7: The best resource I have for the students who want jobs that look different from mine, the people I know who have those jobs, they've been fantastic. And I try and be a service to them, help them with things, but it's also nice to be able to give somebody, when they're thinking about, oh, what kind of jobs could I get, I can put them in touch with four or five people who have radically different jobs but all use the same skill set. And there are people who are willing to have the kinds of searching conversations that you do when you're trying to figure out what you want to do.