Summer 2020 RiDE Fellowship
Nicholas School of the Environment Individual Development Plan (IDP) Summary
Amelia Johnson, Marine Science and Conservation PhD Student
In January 2020, the Marine Science and Conservation (MSC) PhD program underwent
its external review. Out of that review came a final report from the external review team that
contained a number of recommendations to improve our program. Many of these matched with
the recommendations from the Duke University Reimaging Doctoral Education (RiDE) report.
To help implement several of these recommendations into the MCS PhD program, Dr. James
Hench (MSC DGS) and Rachel Lo Piccolo (MSC DGSA) submitted a proposal to the 2020
Summer Funding for Doctoral Students Related to Reimagining Doctoral Education (RiDE)
Implementation grant. Through this program, I was funded to help improve the MSC PhD annual
student evaluation process this summer.
Currently, the MSC’s annual student evaluation process focuses on student progress
made in the past year (e.g., courses completed, presentations, manuscripts submitted, outreach
activities). Students meet with their advisor at the end of spring semester to discuss their progress
and any problems that arose in the past year. While this format has been helpful to assess if
students are on track for their degrees, we wish to make this process more constructive and
useful for PhD students by replacing it with an assessment that is more forward-thinking. We
planned to create an individual development plan (IDP) that focuses on helping students define
and pursue their career goals and facilitating an open discussion with advisors about plans for the
upcoming year. After reading through several IDP models published online, we identified the
IDP used by the School of Biosciences at Stanford University as a model, which would work
well for our purposes. We contacted the Stanford University BiosSci Careers and received
permission to adapt their IDP template for our own.
In the RiDE Implementation proposal, we said we would share the IDP with the other 5
PhD programs within the Nicholas School of the Environment but have gone beyond that to
include all the programs in the creation and development of this work. Using the Stanford model
as a guideline, I met with Directors of Graduate Studies, other faculty, and students from across
the six PhD programs to discuss what they would like to see in a document such as this. Using
this feedback, I refined the Stanford IDP model to fit the needs of our PhD programs.
The final version of this new Nicholas School of the Environment IDP program has three
separate forms – 1) an evaluation to be filled out annually by the advisor prior to meeting with
each student; 2) an IDP for incoming first year PhD students that focuses on creating a strong
mentoring relationship between the student and advisor; and 3) an IDP for PhD students in year 2
and beyond. This last document focuses on research and career goals, challenges, professional
development activity plans, the identification of new skills to develop, and plans to leverage
mentorship from multiple faculty mentors. Each PhD student will meet with their advisor at
least once a year at the start of the academic year to discuss the IDP (students and faculty will be
asked to share their completed documents with each other prior to meeting). At the end of the
meeting, the student and advisor will jointly develop an Action Plan to address specific goals in
the upcoming year.
