Graduate and Professional School Student Support

All Poorvu Center resources and services for Graduate School and Professional School students will resume with the start of the Fall 2021 semester. Some services will use Zoom to host meetings between fellows and students and some will occur face-to-face, so look at individual announcements to determine the venue for an event or activity. Please find the instructions below for accessing resources and services; unfortunately most meeting rooms in the Poorvu Center do not allow for proper social distancing between students/fellows.

Because some of these services will rely on Zoom, please create a Yale Zoom account in advance.

Graduate and professional school students will receive additional information from the dean of each school.

Writing

Writing consultations will take place online. If your document is 10-20 pages (2,500-5,000 words) double-spaced, please book an hour-long session. If your document is up to 10 pages or less (2,500 words or less), you may choose between a 30-minute or hour-long session depending on your needs.

The Poorvu Center’s Graduate Writing Lab will work with you on the following writing projects:

  • Dissertation prospectuses
  • Dissertation chapters or theses
  • Research papers or journal articles
  • Research or personal statements for a fellowship application
  • Conference abstracts or presentations
  • Coursework or class assignments

Graduate Writing Fellows are ready to help you at any stage of the writing process from an outline to the final draft. Writing fellows can work with you on clarity and coherence, discuss the development of your argument, and offer strategies to strengthen your structure or express your voice. They can also help you with your paragraph and sentence structure and work with you to improve your grammar.

If you need assistance with your curriculum vitae and other career materials, please contact the Office of Career Strategy. If you need help with your teaching portfolio or your teaching statement, please see “Teaching” below.

Schedule a consultation using WCOnline.

Teaching

The Poorvu Center serves many populations: graduate students, professional school students, and postdoctoral fellows/associates. With an extensive set of workshops for new teachers, we encourage creativity and promote good teaching practices. Take advantage of one-on-one consultations and share your teaching challenges in a neutral space. Those who want to pursue intensive teaching development can enroll in the Certificate in College Teaching Preparation (CCTP), which requires teaching at Yale, participating in workshops, observing others’ teaching, and preparing a capstone teaching portfolio. At the heart of our program, we have a group of McDougal Teaching Fellows who run many of our workshops. We also serve the teaching needs of individual departments, promote faculty-student mentoring, and respond to emerging developments in research about teaching.

Teaching Consultations

The Poorvu Center will conduct consultations via Zoom or or in person for the fall 2021 semester. You can request a pedagogical consultation on our main website. You can use a consultation to review your teaching statement, teaching portfolio, or discuss a pedagogical topic related to your current/future teaching. Request a consultation online.

Teaching Workshops

The Poorvu Center has published a calendar for the Fundamentals of Teaching workshop series and the Advanced Teaching Workshop series  for the fall 2021 semester. You will find the calendar on our Yale Connect group, powered by CampusGroups.

Communication

We encourage graduate and professional school students to communicate with faculty advisers to establish the best way to confer with them (including using Zoom where appropriate). Routine feedback on research and dissertation-writing should continue in any environment. 

Share Feedback

Do you have additional questions? Please contact us