Yale Summer Academy

The GSAS Yale Summer Academy offers short courses for graduate students on a range of scholarly and professional topics that take advantage of the summer as a good time to pursue professional development. Each course will run for 2, 3, or 4 two-hour sessions, either in person or on Zoom.  See below for Summer 2026 offerings. Questions? Contact suzanne.young@yale.edu.

Strategies for Career Success Inside and Outside of the Academy

Join us for a three-part career development workshop series designed to help graduate students move beyond traditional job applications and take a strategic, proactive approach to career advancement. This series begins by unpacking how hiring really works and how to build meaningful professional connections that open doors. We then focus on career exploration, introducing Beyond the Professoriate platform as a key tool to help you identify paths aligned with your skills, interests and values. In the final session, we bring these strategies together to help you create a focused, sustainable career development plan for the summer months and beyond, while crafting compelling application materials that stand out to hiring managers.

Each session includes a 30-minute guided “work-in-place” activity, allowing participants to immediately apply what they’ve learned and make tangible progress in their career development. This series is ideal for PhD students and postdocs exploring careers both within and beyond academia.

Facilitated by Hyun Ja Shin and Jacob Gonzalez (Yale Office of Career Strategy).  On Zoom.

Introduction to GenAI for Teaching, Research, and Productivity

This short course provides structures to develop professional habits and ethics for navigating the rapidly changing landscape of GenAI in graduate teaching and research. Interrupt your ChatGPT-matic slumber with sessions that include explorations of Yale’s suite of GenAI tools in your discipline, sharing findings with peers, and creating a personal plan for keeping up to date on new developments. How can AI enhance your research, provide creative approaches to teaching, and boost your productivity? Participants should expect to engage with artificial intelligence applications both in sessions and on their own throughout the course.

In person in the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, Room 120A. T/Th, 10:00-11:30am, June 16, 18, 23, 25.

Facilitated by Connie Steel, PhD, Program Manager for Office of the Provost AI Initiatives

REGISTER

Advanced Research Techniques with AI

This two-part workshop series will help participants gain a sophisticated understanding of what is possible in using AI for research. Working with a test case (using AI to build entries in Wikipedia), participants will learn about databases, data storage, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), synthetic data set generation, and fine-tuning an AI model. The controlled research experience will allow participants to understand an entire workflow, which they can investigate further on their own.

Facilitated by Clifford Anderson, Director, Yale Divinity Library.

McDougal Center (135 Prospect St.); date TBD

Registration link for both workshops:

Summer Writing-in-Residence Dissertation Working Group

Yale’s GSAS Summer Dissertation Writing-in-Residence Group offers a cohort of humanities and social science scholars a six-week program to make substantial progress on their dissertations. Participants will receive faculty mentor support, develop writing strategies, and exchange feedback while building a sustaining community. The program not only advances dissertation work but also helps establish enduring personal writing practices, with participants who complete the program continuing to write regularly, make steady progress, and support each other post-program. The program runs from June 29 to August 7, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. EST on Zoom.  

Students are expected to participate daily, Monday through Friday, during regular working hours for the duration of the six-week period, except for cases of illness or brief travel to scheduled family or professional events. 

The faculty mentor is Elleza Kelley, Assistant Professor of English and Black Studies.

Application

PhD students who have advanced to candidacy, with an approved dissertation prospectus, are eligible to apply. Application materials include: 1) a cover letter of no more than one page, detailing where you are in the writing of your dissertation and the reasons you wish to participate in this group; 2) a graduate transcript; and, 3) a very brief letter from your dissertation advisor indicating your readiness to participate in the program. All materials, with the exception of the recommendation, must be submitted as a single PDF document to Graduate Writing Lab Director Ryan Wepler (ryan.wepler@yale.edu) by May 13.

Yale Summer Academy 2025 (archive)

Yale Summer Academy 2024 (archive)