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

Research Organization and Citation Management (Online)

Don’t wait until the end to make your bibliography! Join a librarian to learn techniques to stay organized throughout the research process. This session will include how Zotero can be incorporated into your workflow to stay organized, take notes, and to create citations and a bibliography.
Attendees will learn how to:
•    Set up the Zotero application with unlimited cloud storage (iOS and Windows)
•    Find, save, and organize source citations (for books, articles, news, and more)
•    Techniques to read and annotate PDFs
•    Create a bibliography
There will be opportunities for hands-on practice and questions. This workshop will be run by Kelly Blanchat, Associate Director for Learning Engagement, Yale Library. Open to any Yale affiliate; participants from GSAS Summer Academy are encouraged to register. 

Date & Time: July 16, 10am - 11:15am

Register: https://schedule.yale.edu/event/16933696

Data Research Support (Online)

What kind of “data” do you need for your studies? There might be more to consider! In this session, librarians will provide information about data services and resources of interest across a variety of disciplines, where “data” can include:

  • numerical data
  • archival materials
  • historical or art objects
  • secondary literature
  • experimental data

Learn how to get started, who on campus can support you, and what you may want to consider as you plan your data projects. There will be opportunities for hands-on discovery and questions.  This workshop will be run by Jessica O'Toole, Social Science Librarian, and Brandon Miliate, Research Data Management Librarian. This workshop is for Yale GSAS Summer Academy affiliates.

Date & Time: Friday, July 17, 10am - 11am
Register: https://schedule.yale.edu/event/16988004

Text as Data: Computational Methods for Unstructured Text (in person)

This workshop introduces methods for exploring and analyzing unstructured text, such as newspapers, articles, or social media posts. In the first half of the workshop, participants will learn about the foundational principles of the text as a data framework, how to convert documents into a dataset, and how to prepare the data for analysis. The second half will include a tutorial session introducing several text analysis methods using R and the tidyverse packages. The workshop will be led by Jordan Bratt, the Digital Humanities Librarian.

Date & Time: July 21st, 10:00am – 12 noon
Location: In person at the McDougal Graduate Student Center, 135 Prospect St.
Register: https://cglink.me/2dA/r2324428 

First Steps with Claude Code (in person)

Learn to automate the boring parts of research: organizing readings, drafting and revising text, reviewing documents, and producing clean documentation that makes projects easy to pick back up. This short workshop introduces Claude Code as a practical assistant you can configure to handle repeatable work quickly, consistently, and in a way that fits your workflow. You'll learn how agentic AI differs from a standard chat, how to write a claude.md file to set your working conventions, and how to build reusable skill files for recurring tasks. No coding experience required. This workshop will be led by Ted Ellsworth, Manager of Statistical Support Services for Yale Library.

Day/Time: July 27, 10:00am – 12 noon
Location: In person at the McDougal Graduate Student Center, 135 Prospect St.
Registration: https://cglink.me/2dA/r2324429 

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)