The DIY PhD

The Universe is our University

What it is:

A DIY PhD is creating a deeper education that honors our bodies and spirits as much as our minds. 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 multispecies ways of knowing, and are an unfolding pathway of resonance, as Earth.

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 really an initiation year.

Applications for the 2023 Year One Course are now open! This will be the 6th Cohort beginning their programs with our school! Details like sliding scale tuition and FAQs are below. We will begin the Spring Semester in early February 2023. Apply here.

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. 

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

Our 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

 How it works:

We meet weekly online 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 our ancestor and spirit guides, an embodiment practice to open the channels for our learning to flow, and a guided meditation and/or mapping prompt to begin seeing our programs emerge.

After a Summer Break, we resume meeting biweekly as a large group, and biweekly in a smaller mini cohort, to map our programs and cowork on the creative research projects we are called to. The mini cohorts can then continue in their own autonomous learning path after the Year One Course is complete, or choose to join our Dissertation Integration class at any time in the future.

Our desire is to prepare multi-dimensional planetary scholars for a continued learning towards dream dissertations that nurture an abundant, collective and healing shift from the Anthropocene  ~ or humyn-centered paradigm, to the Ecocene ~ where all beings are living freely in reciprocity again. 

There is no one-right-way to do this, and you will never fail or be behind in our program. Your DIY PhD is yours; whatever learning is taking place in your life is integrated and connected to your DIY PhD. This includes breaks for healing, integration, rest and play.

You don’t need to know your destination or what you desire to study at the beginning. If you feel called to join us, please do! Questions? Email hello@ecocene.school

Apply for our Spring 2023 Cohort

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



Hear from our previous cohorts:

FAQ's

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 $40,000/year income or access to wealth:

$222/month for 8 months, or $1500 paid at once, saving $276.

Level 2 for people with $40,000 – $80,000/year

$333/month for 8 months, or $2400 paid at once, saving $264.

Level 3 for folks with over $80,000/year:

$444/month, or $3300 paid at once, saving $252

We have four scholarships available for low-income Black and/or Indigenous community members.

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.

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