Program Development & Alumni Engagement

Mentor

Abby Stayart, PhD Director, myCHOICE

Background

myCHOICE is UChicago’s STEM career development and exposure program for graduate student and postdoctoral trainees in the sciences. Originally funded as an experiment through an NIH Broadening Experiences in Scientific Training grant, myCHOICE is in its 8th year and has been institutionalized at the university. The myCHOICE offers a weekly seminar series, workshops and mini-courses, part-time externship, a mentor network, and long-distance career treks. Once designed specifically for trainees in the biological sciences, the program has demonstrated relevance to trainees in the physical sciences, engineering, and social sciences disciplines, and welcomes the entire community to participate in its offerings.

Externship Description

The Program Development & Alumni Engagement externship is central to the weekly career exploration seminar series “What Can I Do with My PhD?” and conceptualization of new myCHOICE programmatic offerings. The  externship will focus on developing topics for future webinars, recruiting panelists, and ideating new types of programming.

The Work

• Program Development: The extern will work with the director and volunteer team to generate ideas for the seminar series and new myCHOICE programming. This will involve familiarizing yourself with the topics that have been popular in the past and contributing your disciplinary and career interests in suggesting new topics. You will use various resources available to you through myCHOICE and our partnering offices to conceptualize events and research potential panelists/mentors.
• Alumni Engagement: The extern will identify contact information for the prospective panelists and, using established language and communication strategies, will recruit panelists by pitching the myCHOICE program and the volunteer opportunity.
• Communications & Marketing: The extern will learn branding guidelines and use these to generate marketing materials for events, and identify ideal channels for communicating the event to prospective audiences. You will help to craft a digital media campaign to maximize each event’s presence on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and contribute to the overall public visibility of myCHOICE.

Specific Objectives

• Become familiar with the process of design, development, and execution of a seminar series.
• Help to ideate and realize a new form of myCHOICE programming.
• Contribute discipline-specific knowledge of career outcomes to topic development.
• Learn standards for cold-call outreach to prospective participants.
• Learn best practices for communicating with and coordinating volunteers.
• Generate event summaries, advertising language, and social media campaigns for upcoming events.
• Understand how the seminar series intersects with other aspects of programming and generate coordinated social media campaigns.
• Support the greater myCHOICE mission by broadening trainee awareness of professional development opportunities and diverse career outcomes relevant to STEM PhDs.

Qualifications

Candidates should have excellent written, oral, and social-emotional communication skills, should be comfortable working collaboratively with an enthusiastic team on interconnected projects, and share our interest in developing exciting and relevant opportunities for STEM trainees.

Why this externship?

• You will gain or strengthen skills in program development, outreach, and communications and marketing.
• You will be offered invaluable access to our broad network of alumni and PhD-trained professionals working throughout the STEM workforce, including seminar panelists, externship hosts, and mentors.
• You will expand your own awareness of potential diverse career outcomes.
• You will help to diversify myCHOICE offerings and shape the program’s future.

Before submitting an application, please visit the Externships page for instructions regarding our new application platform: myCHOICE-Symplicity.