North West Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership
Method to the madness: the art of writing methodology chapters
Rosie Harrison, Business & Management, Lancaster University (2019 Cohort)
Although your methodology chapter is seen as the easiest chapter to write, I have found it really hard to balance what I need to say for my thesis to pass, and what I want /like /find easier to write about. After rewriting this chapter about 20 times and still not being happy with it, I decided to seek out some professional help. The NCRM website is a great source of training sessions, and with the RTSG covering most training costs, they are a good way of benefiting from expertise outside your institution. Especially now when provision is mostly online, I have found it a really good way of accessing courses which would otherwise have proved impossible due to the time and travel requirements when needing to travel around the country.
Read More“Publications are your ticket out of grad school”
Megan Readman, Psychology, Lancaster University (2017 Cohort)
Around 2 ½ years ago my supervisor told me, “Publications are your ticket out of grad school…it is your publications that will get you post-doc and lectureship positions” this conversation has stuck with me since that day.
I am sure we, PhD students, are all very aware that our achievements in the world of academia are often measured by our publications (and later our grant successes). Whether that’s right or wrong is another matter, but due to this many of us will continually be striving for the next publication. I must admit as a young fresh-faced undergraduate (and probably also Msc student) I naively thought the publication process was pretty straightforward in that you write an article, select an appropriate journal, submit the article and bam a while later after making some minor amendments the article is published. How very wrong I was…
Read MoreOverseas Institutional Visit during a pandemic
Yigit Oezcelik, Economics, University of Liverpool (2018 Cohort)
As Benjamin Franklin once said: “An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”. This also holds during a pandemic. As the Overseas Institutional Visit funding (OIV funding) promotes such an investment in advancing and disseminating knowledge abroad, I decided to go to Berlin, after I was invited by Prof Radosveta Ivanova-Stenzel. At the beginning of January 2021, I travelled to Berlin in order to start my visit at Technical University Berlin and stayed there until the end of March 2021.
Read More“R” you considering attending an online training course?
Chloe Brennan, Psychology, University of Liverpool (2018 Cohort)
I have wanted to learn R since I started my PhD and after learning about the benefits of doing structural equation modelling (SEM) in R I knew I needed to bite the bullet and sign up to a training course since I would be using this method in my PhD. Although training courses can be pricey, I am lucky to be a NWSSDTP funded PhD student because I can use the Research Training Support Grant to cover the costs.
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North West Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership 