Design Your Hustle: Building a Career on Your Own Terms

About This Event

Did you begin your graduate program hoping for a career shaped around your core values, intellectual curiosity, and vision for a more humane world? Has that possibility come to seem increasingly remote? In fact, your advanced training can open many more doors than you may have imagined. Join Erica Machulak, founder of the social impact startup Hikma and author of Hustles for Humanists (Rutgers University Press, 2025), for an exploration of entrepreneurial pathways extending far beyond a traditional academic career. We’ll consider how the skills and passions that brought you to graduate school can become the foundation for meaningful work that you design—whether that means full professional self-employment, an income-generating side venture, or a creative complement to paid work within or beyond the academy. This program invites you to imagine, and begin building, a professional life of greater agency, purpose, and possibility. Bonus: drawing for 5 free copies of Hustles for Humanists!

Featured Guests

• Erica Machulak, Hikma (social impact startup)

Co-sponsors

• Cornell University
• University of Rochester