Career & Tools
Check out this UCSB series on grad student and postdoc professional development experiences funded by the Individualized Professional Skills (IPS) Program. This week's featured video is by Muna Saber, a PhD student in Chemical Engineering, who used the IPS funds to attend the Gordon Research Conference. Read on to watch the video and learn more about the IPS program!
Have you ever wished you had support to take advantage of a professional or career development opportunity that lies outside the scope of your academic research? The UCSB Individualized Professional Skills (IPS) Program is designed to help graduate students and postdoctoral scholars fill in the funding gaps for pursuing opportunities that support your professional development in a variety of career trajectories.
IPS Insights: In our series, "IPS Insights," previous awardees share about their IPS-funded experiences in short informational videos. This week's featured video is by Muna Saber, a PhD student in Chemical Engineering.
Muna used the IPS funds to attend the Gordon Research Conference. Watch the video to learn more!
In Muna's Words: What I Learned
"The Gordon Research Conference was professionally beneficial to me in two distinct ways. Through attending the seminar section of the research conference, I was able to learn different computational techniques used for performing both synthetic and thermodynamic prediction using high throughput techniques. I learned about large datasets for both organic and inorganic compounds. It overall gave me a wide breadth of both atomistic and mesoscale computational techniques used both at the national laboratory and industrial level. In addition to the seminar portion of the conference, I was able to continuously interact with others who work at national labs at a variety of different levels. Conversations with these fantastic people, both through the poster sessions and over dinner and coffee hours, gave me a good idea of the type of work I would want to do after I finish my Ph.D."
IPS Program Overview
Awards up to $1000 are granted to eligible UCSB graduate students and postdoctoral scholars from any discipline who wish to individually tailor their career paths with outside professional development opportunities. The purpose of the IPS program is to help grad students and postdocs take greater agency in their own career path by funding exploration of a range of professional development opportunities across a variety of career and skill interests.
The IPS Program is a collaboration between the Professional Development Series at the Center for Science and Engineering Partnerships; Graduate Division; the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; UCSB Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative and CNSI Technology Incubator; Career Services; UCSB's divisional deans; and external donors. Learn more about the program here!