Semester 2: 08 February-11 June 2021
Programme overview
All our Postgraduate Researcher Development Programme (PRDP) workshops are taking place online until further notice. Most of our own sessions will be held on Microsoft Teams, a platform in your university Office 365 account. Sessions from external providers may take place on other platforms such as Zoom. Sessions are usually held on Wednesdays. Most are scheduled for two hours but will usually be shorter or feature a break in the middle.
Booking and joining
Please book your place on PhD Manager via the links below. You’ll find join codes on the event listing on PhD Manager. Sessions will usually run in the main PRDP 2020-21 Teams group although a few sessions may run in standalone groups and have their own unique join code. For guidance on using Teams codes, see our Teams help page.
Session recordings
Most sessions, unless they are interactive, will be recorded and attendees will be notified that a recording is about to take place. Recordings can be found on our PRDP semester 2 workshop recordings page . Sessions which ran in semester 1 and are repeated in semester 2 will not be recorded for a second time but, if available can be found on our PRDP semester 1 workshop recordings page.
More workshops will be added to the programme as the year progresses.
Academic English Language Skills
See our courses and tutorials for doctoral students who don’t have English as their first language.
Preparing for your Secondary APR
Wednesday 10 February. 14.30-16.30
Wednesday 05 May, 10.00-12.00
The aim of the Secondary APR is to assess your progress towards completion and against your current Research Plan. Secondary APRs take place before the end of the second year of study for full-time students and before the end of the third year of study for part-time students. (See Code of Practice section 7.)
This workshop will help you prepare your document for your Secondary APR and defend it at the APR meeting. The core skills addressed will include:
- writing and chapter preparation
- presentation skills and engagement with the wider academic community
- the identification of new knowledge and what it means to make an original contribution to knowledge.
Book your place on PhD Manager by clicking on your preferred date above.
Working with your Inner Critic (NEW in 2020-21!)
Wednesday 17 February 11.00-12.00
Is your writing insufficiently critical? Are you slow to progress? Do your presentations bore your audience?
This session will acknowledge and give time to the inner critic and help you to devise strategies for developing a life-long working relationship with that voice. Using a mix of writing exercises and discussion, this will be a safe space to share experiences and techniques that will help you to navigate moments of self-doubt – that we all have – and to value time to be kind to you.
This session is not available as a recording but we hope to repeat it later in the year.
Literature Reviews and Research Diaries
Wednesday 03 March, 10.00-12.00
This session covers the role of the literature review in research. It looks at aims, strategies for identifying and managing the relevant literature, critical reviewing, and the use of literature and the literature review in a doctoral thesis.
See Semester 1 recordings to watch these two sessions.
An Introduction to Research Ethics and Integrity (mandatory for Year 1)
Tuesday 09 March, 10.00-12.00
This workshop (mandatory for year 1 students) will provide a background to the areas of research ethics and research integrity and why they are important. It will include an introduction to the University’s three tier ethics review framework, and the processes involved, and will look at some common ethical issues, and discuss how these can be addressed.
The session will also look at what we mean by research integrity, and will identify some barriers to research integrity and potential causes of research misconduct. Case studies will be used to consider how ethical dilemmas can be resolved, and illustrate how poor research practice can be avoided.
This online session will not be recorded but will be repeated every few months in 2020-21.
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Becoming ‘Open Scholars’ (NEW in 2020-21!)
Wednesday 10 March, 10.00-11.30
The need for change in the way we conduct research has become increasingly apparent. Examples of fraud and misconduct may take the headlines, but misapplication of statistics, and pressure to publish amongst other issues have lead to a ‘Credibility Crisis’.
In response to these concerns, initiatives and organisations have emerged to promote the development and use of “Open” practices such as data sharing and pre-registering methods/hypotheses before conducting research. Even academic journals and funders are now beginning to find ways to adopt and support more open ways of working with the aim of improving the quality of research.
As the Open Science movement gains ground the term ‘Open’ has come to refer to more than just discipline-specific ‘best practices’ and more a culture of open, inclusive, fair and productive ways of working together. Here I refer to all of this as Open Scholarship. In this talk I will provide some background to the growth of Open Scholarship, introduce examples of ‘Open’ practices and together we will think about how we can make these practices part of our research culture in a manageable way.
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Maintaining Motivation during your Research Degree (NEW in 2020-21!)
Wednesday 10 March, 14.30-16.00
This workshop will look at some of the reasons why motivation can be hard to maintain for the duration of a research degree. Drawing on a range of theories, we will examine the things that motivate and de-motivate researchers. We will discuss strategies to boost self-motivation to help you manage your approach to your work, attain your goals, and thrive throughout your doctoral journey.
Book your place on PhD Manager
Academic Writing Skills
Wednesday 17 March, 14.30-16.30
Academic writing is seen by many as daunting, difficult, challenging. Whilst we can all agree that we have to be able to write for academic audiences, in this session we will look at academic writing in a different way.
There is no one best way to write, approach writing or revise our writing. Imagination, planning and preparation, revision are all needed but, most of all, we must be able to read well. We’ll start by looking at how we read academic texts before going on to look at useful strategies that help you start, continue and complete a writing task before trying a range of writing exercises to find the strategies and tactics that work best for each of us.
And, unlike the often recited story about academic writing, we’ll have some fun along the way.
Book your place on PhD Manager
Preparing for your Primary APR
Wednesday 17 March, 10.00-12.00
Tuesday 27 April, 14.30-16.30
Wednesday 19 May, 10.00-12.00
Your first APR will take place 8 months into your PhD journey. It is a point to pause and reflect on progress, support, training and future plans. Central to your APR will be a critical reflection on your research plan and the progress you have made against it.
This session will help you to understand the structure, purpose and outcomes of the APR meeting; understand the skills and knowledge you are required to demonstrate at APR; and prepare the materials for your APR meeting.
Book your place on PhD Manager by clicking on your preferred date above.
Looking Ahead: Career Planning for Doctoral Students
Thursday 25 March, 10.00-11.30
In this seminar we will explore some key factors in decision-making; evaluating career options within academia and outside it; evaluating skills in addition to your research capabilities; developing a career plan.
This session is delivered for us by the University’s Careers Service. Find out more about how the Careers Service can support you as a doctoral student.
This session will not be recorded.
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Preparing for your Viva
Thursday 06 May, 10.30-15.30
It’s the culmination of your research degree: submitting your thesis and defending your work in an oral examination. But what’s the procedure for submission and how can you prepare for the final hurdle? This practical workshop provides an insight into the process, helping you understand the requirements, purpose and possible outcomes of the examination, the roles of those involved, and what to expect from a typical viva. You’ll receive tips and advice on handling nerves, responding to difficult questions and offering a defence without being defensive.
This workshop is aimed at students in the final six months of study. You will be invited to participate in a simulation to help prepare for a mock viva and are asked to bring along an abstract of your work to help shape the discussion.
This session will not be recorded.
Book your place on PhD Manager
Effective CV Writing for Doctoral Students
Wednesday 12 May, 10.00-11.30
In this seminar we will explore how you can build your CV to suit a variety of purposes, including academic applications; what to consider in order to make your CV effective; your CV in context as part of your job search strategy
This session is delivered for us by the University’s Careers Service. Find out more about how the Careers Service can support you as a doctoral student.
This session will not be recorded.
Book your place on PhD Manager
Academic Writing – ‘a process on its way to a product’ (NEW in 2020-21!)
Wednesday 12 May, 14.30-16.30
Unless you are working on a 100% practice-based PhD, developing a skill in academic writing is an essential part of your PhD journey. As well as being a useful transferable skill, it is a skill you simply have to master if you intend to forge a career in academia. This workshop begins with the assumption that, while there is no one fool-proof way to produce consistently effective prose, there are nonetheless a few fairly straightforward strategies you can adopt to improve your writing. The first and perhaps most important of these is to look at the act of writing as ‘a process on its way to a product’ (Marius 1995). As Ernest Hemingway once said, ‘[t]here’s a lot of mechanical work to writing – the first draft of anything is shit’: the real work lies in reworking and rewriting draft after draft. In this workshop we will explore the processes of reworking and rewriting in some detail and look at other strategies that can be adopted which will help improve the clarity of your thesis statements and your general writing style.
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Navigating the Final Stretch
Wednesday 19 May, 14.30-16.30
Sometimes the final six months can be the hardest. This workshop is for any PhD student moving into the later stages of their study. It will look at the discipline of writing up the thesis, ways to tackle procrastination, deal with writer’s block, and the process of submitting your thesis.
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Publishing your work in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Wednesday 26 May, 14.30-16.30
Co-hosted by Dr Tim Wharton of the University of Brighton and Helen Barton, a Chief Commissioning Editor at Cambridge University Press, this workshop will encourage you to look at your thesis in a different way. You’ll explore how to see it as a set of different strands, each of which may be adapted and published in different places. You’ll identify the kind of strategies you need to make your work more ‘publishable’, by focusing on being disciplined and clear in your method and approach. The session will provide information on how you might get involved in book reviewing, and how to choose the most appropriate and impactful journals in which to publish. We’ll discuss the pros and cons of contributing book chapters and if your aim is to publish a research monograph, this session will also advise on that. Finally, in these strange times, we will explore how the global pandemic has affected the publishing industry and how e-publishing is changing its landscape.
Helen Barton works for Cambridge University Press as a Commissioning Editor for books on language and linguistics. She took on this role on completing a BA(Hons) in Linguistics from University College London in 2002. The job involves managing book projects over every stage of its evolution, from discussing an initial idea with an author, right through to publication and beyond. It is a varied and interesting role that involves travelling to universities to meet with authors, and attending conferences to publicise our books. Other than that it is an office-based role, where daily activities include keeping in touch with authors about their progress, managing the review process of new book proposals under consideration, preparing manuscripts for production, overseeing production and marketing, and working to budgets and schedules. It is a rewarding and varied job which is hard work but also a lot of fun.
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Walking around your Thesis (NEW in 2020-21!)
Wednesday 02 June, 14.30-16.30
Digital music recording techniques entail that a ‘song’ or a ‘track’ exists nowhere in physical space. In contrast to older analogue recording systems the ‘duration’ of a piece of music is in no way analogous to any physical representation of that piece (such as, for example, a length of tape or a vinyl disc). Working with modern word-processing software on an extended piece of text – of, say, 60,000 words or more – creates a similar kind of tension between the ‘whole’, the numerous separate parts that make up that whole and its physical instantiation. This workshop ignores issues such as what a PhD is intended to do and what an audience might be expecting from it (these are covered in other workshops) instead focussing on strategies that allow you to step back from the detail of your work in order to see more clearly the bigger picture. It is being able to see this bigger picture that will enable you to decide finally on how to structure your thesis. Central to these strategies is that, contrary to what many people say, structure comes quite late in the writing process.
The session requires the completion of a pre-workshop task, and during the workshop you will work through a series of exercises which will help you think about your work in a more ‘global’ way. It is directed towards mid/late stage doctoral students but all are welcome.
Book your place on PhD Manager
How to use Teams join codes
Enter the join code via the field in the top right corner of your main Teams area. We generally do not provide links to Teams groups so please look out for join codes.
For further details, see our Teams help page.
