Just One Thing: Investing in Your Professional Development over the Winter Break

The winter break presents a chance to pause, reflect, rest, and celebrate winter holidays in community with friends and family. You’ve had a busy fall, balancing academic commitments against a swirl of local and national news that has been at times unsettling. You deserve some downtime to recharge for the spring semester. 

If there’s one thing you could do over these winter break weeks to invest in your professional development, it’s talking to someone in a career of interest to you (or even a career that you’re not yet sure is interesting to you!). These career chats with helpful humans, also referred to as informational interviews, are some of the very best ways you can use one hour during your downtime. Here’s why:

• You will learn about the day-to-day work in this person’s job and at their organization
• You can get a sense from someone who’s been successful in this line of work about what it will take to be a competitive applicant
• You’ll potentially build a connection “on the inside” who may be able to boost your candidacy should you choose to apply for a job there later on
• If you make a strong impression, they may be willing to alert you to job opportunities as they learn about them
• You can ask them to recommend two more people to talk to, building a positive snowball effect as you grow your professional network

I recognize, though, that reaching out to a complete stranger you found on LinkedIn can seem daunting. Fear not! Duke has a community of hundreds of thousands of alumni who have probably benefited from their Duke connections in carving out their career paths. They’re eager to pay it forward by helping current students, particularly in this challenging job market. Duke alumni want to support you as you forge your path toward your professional life. Here are six ways you can leverage your scholarly skills to find the right alums to talk with. Whether you’re just getting started or ready for a more in-depth experience, you can find an option that works for you.

Find out what alumni do after graduation through data and stories.

You can consult career outcomes data for both Ph.D. and master’s graduates on The Graduate School’s website. If you dig into the Tableau visualizations, you can see trends in employers who’ve hired alums from your department or program as well as where in the country and world those alums are working now. To read interviews with some of those alumni, look no further than the Alumni Profiles series, where you’ll find over 200 stories of Graduate School alums and their career paths, which you can filter by disciplinary division and employment sector. This research can help you establish a baseline understanding for common career trajectories for graduates. 

Got a career question? Ask a Blue Devil.

Whether you’re choosing between academia and industry, deciding whether to pursue a Ph.D. after your master’s, or trying to find hiring organizations that align with your values, there’s probably a Duke alum who can help. Ask a Blue Devil takes the guesswork out of finding that alum by using AI to match your question with the right person to answer it. Not sure how to get started? There’s a form to help you draft your question in a polite and professional way, and it will even suggest phrasing for you. The grad students I’ve talked with who used Ask a Blue Devil usually received an offer to follow up over a phone or Zoom call along with their answer from an alum—what a terrific way to start building a relationship.

Use LinkedIn’s alumni tool and the Duke Alumni Network. 

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If you haven’t yet used the Duke Alumni Network, the break is a terrific opportunity to get to know this tool—as a current student, you already have access. (Set up your student profile to get started.) You can filter the list of alumni who are part of the network—over 200,000 strong—to identify graduates from your degree program, or you can even join alumni groups focused on a particular industry, geographic region, or affinity group. Most have a button to “Join group,” and it’s as easy as that.

LinkedIn can offer additional insights into alumni careers as a group. Try visiting the Duke alumni page to find Duke alums with public profiles. Here you can filter the list of alums by their current employers, geographic region, and Duke department. Most importantly, you can see full profile information for these alums without buying a premium subscription. Tip: If you join the Duke University Alumni Network group, you can message Duke alums who are also in that group without the premium version, too.

You can maximize each of these tools by using them together. Learn more about how to use them both to find alumni who could be helpful to your interests in the Finding Alums module of our Canvas course on Writing Alumni Profiles. (By following the link, you’ll see a button to enroll in the course once you login to Canvas).

Interview a graduate alum and publish their profile.

It can be intimidating to reach out to an alum for a conversation. What if you could begin that outreach message by saying, “The Graduate School would like to feature your success story on its website. Could I interview you for 20 minutes over Zoom?” That’s the way that your colleagues have opened the conversations that led to the Alumni Profiles they published. We are always seeking students to interview Graduate School alumni, and our timeline is completely flexible. If you want to learn more about the process, you can find an overview in our Writing Alumni Profiles course on Canvas. 

Ready to build a mentoring relationship with an alum? Apply for Blue Devil Bridges.

If you’re ready for a deeper commitment to a mentoring relationship beyond a single conversation, then Blue Devil Bridges could be the right opportunity for you. The program has just begun accepting graduate students for this unique opportunity. BDB pairs participants with alumni mentors who can share advice on careers, transitions, and life after Duke. Alumni mentors who work in health and healthcare, tech, academia, nonprofits, education, and retail have already expressed interest. Applications close Friday, December 12, 2025, at 11:59 pm. Sponsors: Duke Alumni Engagement and Development, Graduate and Professional Student Government, and Duke Career Center

Connect with many alumni on one day: Mark your calendar for March 20.

Each semester, you can hear from a panel of graduate alumni reflecting on their career paths since departing Duke, followed by an opportunity to engage them in conversation—as well as members of The Graduate School’s Board of Visitors, eminent alumni who are leaders in their fields. The spring semester offering is coming up on Friday, March 20, from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm. You’re welcome to register for the event now while the panelists are being finalized, to be sure you can part. Our past panels have featured too many fascinating alumni to name, so we hope to see you then!

Until that time, I wish you all the best for your winter break, and I hope our paths will cross in the new year.

Author

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Melissa Bostrom, Ph.D.

Senior Assistant Dean, Graduate Student Professional Development

Melissa ensures that all Graduate School students can identify and develop transferable skills to prepare them for success in graduate school and for the full range of career opportunities open to master's- and Ph.D.-prepared professionals. She is Managing Editor of the blog and directs the Professional Development Grant.