The DIY Phd

The Universe is our University

Enrollment for Spring 2025 Cohort 8 is now open.

What’s a DIY Phd?

A DIY PhD is creating a deeper education that honors learning in our bodies and spirits as much as our minds. It’s a reclamation of education for the Earth and legitimizing the knowledges held in our bodies and communities.

Our DIY PhDs thrive when we are in community, connecting to intuition, habitat, and ancestor guides, in cycles of unlearning and learning. Our DIY PhDs are interdisciplinary, honoring multi-species ways of knowing, and unfolding as pathways of resonance through life.

Your DIY PhD is yours! There is no one right way to create your program.

We recommend beginning with a cohort – at least one other person whom you love to learn with – and a weekly time to meet during the semester. Most DIY PhDs take between 4 to 8 years to complete. 

Our School offers a Year One Course for DIY PhDers seeking mentorship, structure, and weekly meetings in like-minded community to begin mapping their emergent programs.

There is no prerequisite nor pressure to know what you are going to do before beginning. Participants usually spend the first semester connecting to bodies, community and habitat; unlearning and composting old limiting beliefs; mapping their interests; and opening to their intuition and spirit guides. 

The second semester is when participants begin to really see their programs emerge, find rhythms of resonance within their research and work, and complete the first year with clarity around what their DIY PhD is about. The first year is an initiation.

Enrollment for the Spring 2025 Cohort 8 is now open! Applications close on Sunday, December 8th, at midnight PST.

Check out our FAQs further below. More questions or want to chat about the program? Email us at hello@ecocene.school with DIY PhD in the subject and we’ll set up a time to connect.

A DIY PhD

finds rhythms in the seasons, roots in identity and habitat, and is co-created by a cohort.

How it Started

In late August of 2013, David Whitaker and Sarita Doe had their sketchbooks open, surrounded by sunlight and succulents we had planted years prior when just beginning graduate school for Art at UCLA. Sarita talked about wanting to continue pursuing higher education, but without going into debt or sacrificing her budding Earth-based spiritual practice, embodied well-being, or interest in non-Western bodies of knowledge. 

Their classroom moved around the city and followed wherever their passions and interests took them. They met weekly and followed what felt fun, healing and resonant. They created countless exercises to center creativity and grow intuition as they learned. Whatever was happening in their daily lives was integral to their program, which shifted with their life experiences. 

David pointed to the words “DIY PhD” in his sketchbook and Sarita said “YES!” And so began their 6-year, self-guided program.

Meet Sarita Doe

Sarita is a parent, steward, and and painter for the Ecocene. She has been teaching art, nature and critical pedagogy for over 20 years. She lives and works on Ohlone Lands with her families.

Creating a DIY PhD is

a loveletter • a habitat offering • a creative passion • community • ceremony • a shift towards plant, soil, ancestors, water, multispecies kin

How it works

Cohorts meet weekly for two hours during the first semester to deepen trust in ourselves and our path.

Each class consists of a check-in to center and learn from our emotions, an incantation to call in support from ancestor and spirit guides, embodiment practice to open the channels for our learning to flow, and guided meditation and/or mapping prompt to begin seeing our programs emerge.

During the second semester, participants meet biweekly in smaller mini-cohorts and biweekly in the large class group. The mini-cohorts can continue in their own autonomous learning path after the Year One Course is complete, or choose to join our cocreation portals to continue their studies in a facilitated group continue at any time in the future.

A DIY Phd

honors learning in body, mind, spirit, emotion, habitat, creativity and community

DIY PhD Cohorts Gain:

  • Trust in themselves and the Universe

  • Structure for organizing and reaching their goals

  • Clarity in their purpose and paths of learning

  • Connection to their guides and intuition

  • Creative play in supportive community

  • Auto-ethnographic research methodologies

  • Connection to the knowledge held in their bodies & in our Earth body

  • Mapping to manifest their dream work, see the intersections of their passions & plan the pathway of their creative pursuits

What Folks Are Saying

  • "The DIY Phd expanded my capacity for self-compassion, increased my sense of curiosity, and helped reinforce trust for my own unique process! I also feel that my intuition strengthened during the course of my first year."

    Christine, Cohort 5

  • "I feel more capable of composting and growing and moving with life and not letting my work be diluted by trauma responses. I now see my life is work and therefore I can create pathways of newness with every turn."

    Coriama, Cohort 5

  • "I am very grateful for being welcomed, affirmed and supported, for the space to express and experiment. My artistic practice has taken on new forms of a multidisciplinary exploration in my own expression."

    Greg Grano, Cohort 4

  • "There were so many moments of assurance “you’re right where you need to be.” There’s a growing awareness of spaciousness, comfort in the liminal spaces of life, and a stronger trust in myself, the forces that drive me, and my guides."

    Niki Tefariki, Cohort 4

  • "The DIY PhD offered another powerful layer about care, about the power of now and slowing down, and what it means to learn commensurate to the group experience and within radical inclusivity."

    margit galanter, Cohort 4

  • "DIY PhD sharpens, brightens, articulates and enhances the reality of other worlds and ecosystems outside of the dominant paradigm. It was a great source of support and encouragement in helping me see, own, and grow my magic."

    Susannah Simpson, Cohort 3

We are creating the deepest and highest education of our dreams.

 FAQs including requirements & tuition:

  • No previous institutional degrees are required! A DIY PhD program can happen in tandem with an institutional program, instead of one, or after one!

  • No! You can come knowing exactly what you know at the time our program begins. We honor cycles of not-knowing as much as cycles of knowing. We support participants in mapping all of their passions, pursuits, and areas of potential study and learning what common threads emerge as especially resonant for their DIY PhD. These paths will also change and shift throughout the program.

  • We are legitimizing ourselves.

    The DIY PhD is a self-accrediting degree program, and currently not guaranteed recognition by any governmental or formal institution. We are reclaiming our own agency and autonomy in deeper and higher educations! School for the Ecocene offers mentorship for planetary learners in their first year of self-guided higher and deeper education.

    DISCLAIMER: We do believe that many professions require technical training that would be unsafe to approach in a DIY fashion, such as engineers or surgeons. As artists, teachers, healers and Earthworkers, however, we feel confident that we can co-create these dream programs with connections to resources in our communities and DIY PhD guides like the Textbook for the Ecocene.

    Additionally, many planetary learners choose to participate in the DIY PhD alongside or to complement more traditional academic programs in order to meet their emotional, physical, and spiritual needs that are often ignored in higher education.

  • DIY PhD tuition is currently offered at a sliding scale.

    Level 1 for people with access to under $40,000/year income or wealth: $180/month for 8 months, or $1200 paid at once, saving $240.

    Level 2 for people with access to $40,000 – $80,000/year income or wealth: $380/month for 8 months, or $2700 paid at once, saving $340.

    Level 3 for folks with access to over $80,000/year income or wealth: $580/month, or $4200 paid at once, saving $440.

    We have four scholarships available for low-income Black and Indigenous scholars in need of financial support. If this applies to you, please indicate in the application.

  • Our curricula moves through monthly themes based on the movements and cycles in our planet and solar system: seed, rooting, water, fire, green, air, connection, cosmos. We tune into trusting the rhythm and pace of our dream lives with our bodies, seasons, cyclical unlearning, relearning and healing. In general, each class includes a check-in, a movement practice, incantation, meditation, and a guided mapping activity. The roots of our learning connect to ancestral lineages based in knowledges we hold in our bodies, ecosystem medicine, Ayurvedic teachings, Earth-based spirituality, critical pedagogy, liberatory frameworks like reparations, unsettling, decolonization and more.

    The first semester is focused on assessing where we are currently at, connecting to our bodies, habitat and emotions as primary sites of learning, growing as a learning community, unlearning and identifying the connections to Earth and spirit guides like ancestors and our own deepest and highest selves that will help our dream programs to unfold before us, with ease.

    The second semester is when we meet biweekly in a large cohort, and biweekly in smaller self-organized mini-cohorts to really clarify what our purpose, projects and learning paths will be. By the completion of this Year One Course, participants are set up to continue learning and creating in any way they desire.

  • This Fall 2022 cohort will be capped at 14 people.

  • Yes. As of Spring 2022, we have a three-month course each semester called “Dissertation Integration,” in which anyone already on their DIY PhD path is welcome to join a weekly container for mapping, centering in on our Dream Dissertations, and co-working as we create our projects. Additionally, Sarita loves providing references and coaching to students who complete our Year One program.