Design your Academic Future

About

Workshop Contents and Objectives

The workshop in a nutshell

Finishing a PhD is both exciting and uncertain. Many researchers feel pressure to “choose the one right path” or fear making the “wrong” career move. This workshop helps you design your future proactively – not by predicting it, but by shaping it with clarity, creativity, and intention. A central principle is learning to think in differentiated, portfolio-based ways: instead of selecting one “correct” method or one single next step, you will explore a portfolio of research methods, research activities, and future professional identities

Rather than viewing your next steps as an either-or decision (academia or industry, research or something else), you will learn to build a portfolio of possible futures. Through Life Design principles, visual thinking, prototyping, and micro-experiments, you will explore multiple career directions, test professional identities, and clarify what kind of future fits your values, strengths, and aspirations. This includes understanding your PhD not as a narrow specialization but as a platform for multiple research and career trajectories.

You will walk away with:

A structured process to reflect on what you want your academic and professional life to look like
Tools to map your skills, strengths, and interests across different roles and domains
Methods to create multiple “future prototypes” instead of one high-pressure decision
Differentiated thinking to build a portfolio of methods and activities, not a single path
Ways to overcome uncertainty, ambiguity, and fear of choosing “wrong”
A personal portfolio of next steps, experiments, and conversations that move you forward
You will apply everything directly to your own future – through guided reflections, peer conversations, visual tools, and practical exercises that help you understand what is possible, what is desirable, and what is actionable.
Grounded in your Life Design approach, this workshop empowers PhD students to build futures that are meaningful, diverse, and fully aligned with who they are becoming.

Full workshop description

PhD students often approach their career path through a narrow lens: either stay in academia or leave it. This workshop breaks that dichotomy. Instead, you will learn how to design a portfolio of possible academic and professional pathways, each with its own logic, opportunities, and risks. This includes learning to think beyond one preferred research method or discipline and instead developing a differentiated understanding of the method mixes, roles, and activities that could shape your research identity and future career. Through Life Design tools, participants explore multiple identities (researcher, educator, innovator, entrepreneur, advisor, leader, etc.) and learn to integrate them into coherent, multi-optional futures.

Drawing on design thinking logic – divergent and convergent thinking, rapid prototyping, iteration, and reframing – participants will learn to move from vague concerns and abstract questions to concrete, testable directions. You will explore alternative career arcs, role models, and pathways, and learn how to test them through informational interviews, simple prototypes, experiments, and conversations.

A core idea is understanding your future as a designed system, not a predetermined path. You will learn to:

Recognize your assumptions about careers and success
Surface hidden beliefs that limit your thinking
Reframe unhelpful narratives (“I need to choose correctly”) into creative possibilities (“I can test multiple futures”)
Replace fear-based decision-making with generative exploration
The workshop integrates visual mapping, narrative exploration, decision-making design, and energy awareness to help you understand which activities nourish you, which drain you, and which form the most promising ingredients for a portfolio-driven career and life path you want to grow into.

Throughout the week, participants engage in interactive exercises, short input sessions, and peer-coaching. You will map your values and motivations, design three alternative life-and-career path “Future Scenarios,” explore the identity shifts involved in transitions, and create a portfolio of experiments that allow you to test your future rather than theorize about it.

During this workshop, participants will gain…

Clarity and future orientation

Tools to articulate what matters to you and what you want to create next
Visual structures to compare alternative futures objectively
A portfolio of options rather than one pressured decision
Creative and strategic thinking

Divergent thinking to imagine multiple research, teaching, professional, or hybrid futures
Convergent thinking to select promising pathways and refine them
Prototyping methods to test futures through small, safe experiments
A differentiated view on method selection, activity design, and career architecture
Confidence and resilience in transitions

Reframing techniques to reduce fear, uncertainty, and perfectionism
Practices to identify your energy sources and design a sustainable career
Social support through peer conversations and shared reflection
A personal action roadmap

Concrete next steps for each possible future
A network map of people to talk to and opportunities to explore
A narrative (“your future story”) that integrates your academic identity with new professional possibilities
At the end of the workshop, participants present their portfolio of future prototypes and a short, engaging narrative – such as a Future Scenarios presentation – that captures their aspirations, values, and next steps.

Course leader

Sebastian Kernbach has a PhD in Communication Science in which he focused on Visual Collaborative Knowledge Work in knowledge-intense collaboration in Professional Services Firms and Design Thinking. He is with the University of St. Gallen where he works as project manager, research associate, and instructor at the Institute of Media and Communications Management

Target group

primarily graduate researchers, PhD researchers, early career researchers

**The Summer School cannot grant credits. We only deliver a Certificate of Participation, i.e. we certify your attendance.**

If you consider using Summer School workshops to obtain credits (ECTS), you will have to investigate at your home institution (contact the person/institute responsible for your degree) to find out whether they recognise the Summer School, how many credits can be earned from a workshop/course with roughly 35 hours of teaching, no graded work, and no exams.

Make sure to investigate this matter before registering if this is important to you.

Prerequisites

No prior experience with Life Design or design thinking is required. Curiosity, openness, and a willingness to explore multiple futures are the only prerequisites. This workshop is especially suited for PhD students who want to become clearer about their decisions, who want to broaden their career vision, or who want to align their academic journey with a meaningful, sustainable next step

Fee info