For over 20 years, Marian and Daniel (and colleagues) have delivered doctoral training for computing students at the Open University. The topics cover the entire doctoral journey. We are happy to offer the resources we have developed through this training for use by students and supervisors alike. If you do uses the sessions, please let the us know. All materials are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.
Among other events, we run a weekly “PGForum”, typically 90 minutes long, which meets for around 35 weeks in any given year. Each session starts with attendees sharing “Happy News”, both professional (such as paper submission) and personal (such as a holiday trip). While this may appear to be a small aspect, it has been instrumental in establishing a positive environment, creating a closer relationship between the students.
Similarly, we have a basic house rule: what happens in PGForum, stays in PGForum. Hence, sessions are not recorded (without prior agreement for specific sessions). We state clearly that PGForum has to be a space for anyone to be able to say anything, without judgement on contributions. Our intention is to create an environment for rigorous debate, awkward questions, sharing good practice, and occasional `non-official’ statements. This freedom of discussion with mutual respect binds the community together.
A .zip file of all of the resources is available for download here.
Welcome
- Welcome with the 10-100 word activity
- Welcome with activity to promote cross-disciplinary discussion
- Welcome with a discussion of work/life balance
- Welcome with open Q&A
Literature
- General reading advice
- Keeping an annotated bibliography
- Reading for a literature review
- How to read a thesis
Writing and arguing
- Making an argument
- Critical writing
- Thesis structure
- Abstracts and Limitations
- Crafting a narrative
- Rigor
Examination
Study Skills
- Project management
- Methods matrix
- Dealing with imposter syndrome
- Impact
- Case studies
- PDP
- Practical ethics
- Research admin
- Research Hygiene
Career Development
Publication
Other sessions
Other sessions we’ve run that don’t come with resources/presentations:
- Post-doc run: What I wish I’d known during my PhD
- Mock post-doc interview
- Student led session on recommended tools
- How to work a room/network
- Small number stats from the Department of Maths and Statistics
- Introduction to Latex and Overleaf
- Introduction to qualitative analysis
- Introduction to Nvivo
- Cross-disciplinary research
- The viva survivor – delivered by a student who has recently completed their viva
- Epistemology
- Teaching opportunities
- How to manage your supervisor
- Industry careers and CVs