The DIY PhD

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 under $30,000/year income or access to wealth:

$180/month for 8 months, or $1200 paid at once, saving $240.

Level 2 for people with $30,000 – $70,000/year income or access to wealth:

$380/month for 8 months, or $2700 paid at once, saving $340.

Level 3 for folks with over $70,000/year income or access to wealth:

$580/month, or $4200 paid at once, saving $440.

We also 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.