54 Campus Wide Opportunities

Professional Development from the Graduate School

The Graduate School communicates professional development opportunities through an e-newsletter, GradConnections, that all graduate students receive at their wisc.edu email. Graduate students in traditional graduate degree programs receive the newsletter weekly during the academic year and every other week in the summer. Graduate students in online degree programs receive the newsletter every other week during the academic year and monthly during the summer.

The Graduate School develops and curates a wide variety of resources for professional development, including a tool to assess your skills, set goals, and create a plan with recommended activities on campus as well as programming to help you explore careers, prepare for a job search, build your network and learn from alumni, manage projects, communicate about your research, and much more. Included in the resources is information about developing an Individual Development Plan (IDP). IDPs tend to be focused on PhD student needs, but they may still provide some useful ideas and resources to explore.

DiscoverPD helps master’s and doctoral students at UW-Madison advance their academic and professional goals with customized recommendations based on a skills self-assessment. The 400+ professional development recommendations available in the DiscoverPD database are available in a range of formats to best meet your diverse needs, including in-person, virtual, asynchronous, and synchronous opportunities. All of this can be found at:

Beyond Graduate School is a one-of-a-kind online career training platform for master’s students. The platform provides on-demand, self-paced learning modules that allow master’s students to explore career options and learn proven job search strategies to secure employment after graduation. Beyond Grad School also hosts a unique video library where students can hear from master’s degree holders working in all career sectors.

Beyond Graduate School benefits master’s students by:
• supporting career exploration and building job search skills.
• providing proven job search strategies so students can leverage their education into professional careers of their choice.
• providing accessible, well-curated resources for busy master’s students.
• complementing existing on-campus graduate student career supports.
• offering recorded seminars, workbooks, and a one-of-a-kind informational interview library where students can learn from other master’s degree holders.

To log in, visit Beyond Graduate School, select University of Wisconsin-Madison, and enter your institutional login information.

Handshake is UW-Madison’s primary tool to connect students with employers, job and internship opportunities, and career events and resources.

Big Interview is an online system that combines training and practice to help improve each user’s interview technique and build confidence.