Many graduate students and recent PhDs choose to freelance because of a combination of financial precarity and genuine interest. Often, the opportunity emerges when an advisor, a colleague, or a personal connection reaches out for short-term support with a specific project, such as an academic manuscript index, a dissertation copyedit, or a college-bound teenager’s personal essay. The ad hoc freelancer accepts the offer, excels, and stumbles into a growing side hustle without any marketing at all. This two-part workshop series, open to humanities and social sciences graduate students, will prompt you to translate your strengths into services.
Workshop 1: Choose What to Offer
Leveraging the strengths-based framework that underpins all Hikma programming, you will be invited to take stock of what you already bring to the table and unpack the complexity of your skill set so that you can clarify what you want to offer and communicate the value of that offer to clients. This act of translation moves in both directions, and your facilitator will define and situate key vocabulary from the world of entrepreneurship to clarify core business concepts.
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Translate your strengths into services.
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Describe a service you could offer by tomorrow.
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This workshop builds the foundation for diverse applications such as clarifying your value proposition, communicating your value in context, pitching your services to prospective clients, pricing your offer, and developing client relationships.
Part 2, "Communicate Your Value," will take place on Tues., Feb. 13th, from 4:00-5:30 PM. Register here for a Zoom link for both sessions. For questions, contact SueJeanne Koh at sj.koh@uci.edu.
About Erica Machulak and the Hikma Collective
Erica Machulak (she/her), PhD, is the Founder and Lead Facilitator of Hikma, a social impact startup with a mission to mobilize scholarship for the public good through consulting, capacity building, and storytelling. Over the past two years, Hikma clients have secured $6M+ in research funding, informed new policies, and published their work in media outlets such as Forbes and the CBC.
As a writer, editor, and facilitator, Erica believes that the world needs to hear more from people who resist easy answers. Since completing her dissertation on Arabic influences in medieval English literature, Erica has written articles for Inside Higher Ed, Intellect Ltd, and Humanities, the magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (BA), the University of Oxford (MSt.), and the University of Notre Dame (PhD).