Webinars for Newly Admitted Graduate Students 2024 - Graduate Centre for Academic Communication

OK.

Yeah, so are you.

And then if I if I just click that button it will take me. So I just have to click on the slide.

Yep, hi everyone, we're just sorting out some of the tech before we get started.

Umm, do you want? Do you want to try a quick test on the slides chain and then see make sure you're comfortable?

Yeah, got it.

OK, great. Hi everyone, and welcome to today's webinar. In the grand UFT tradition, we're actually going to start a little bit after the scheduled start time just to give other participants a chance to arrive. I see our numbers of participants are still taking up steadily 7879. So we'll give we've hit 80. So let's give everyone a chance to get in and get settled before we get into the the meat and potatoes of today's session. So welcome to today's webinar. My name is Rory McEwen. I work at the School of Graduate Studies as admissions and international student Advisor.

And I'm organizing these webinars to help incoming graduate students get oriented to the various resources that they have available to them on campus. And one of those key resources for graduate students is the Graduate Center for Academic Communication. A little bit of housekeeping before we get started.

Rory, there's quite a bad echo. I don't know if there's anything you can do to address that.

I don't think there's much I can do.

Um, let me try one thing.

Can you hear me now and is there much echo or is it alright?

Oh, I I now can't hear you.

Can you say something, Jane?

Can you say something now?

We're stuck. I'm afraid I'm going to have to use the headphones.

Sorry, can you say something now?

Can you hear me now?

OK, good.

I can't hear anything at all. So the good news is that I don't have to hear anything for today's. Yes, I can now. It works alright, Thanks. Putting up with that everyone. Welcome to the world of online webinars.

Anyway, so this is a series of webinars and they're supposed to be very subject specific, so we're only taking questions today about services offered by the Graduate Center for Academic Communication.

We've already hosted webinars on financial aid and awards, on housing, on graduate mentorship and supervision, Wellness and accessibility. And also we have an upcoming webinar on fees and registration. So we ask people to keep those questions strictly for the webinar that you're that you're in at the moment. We also have two topics that are of huge interest to incoming students that we don't cover. That is course selection and enrollment, and for international students, immigration issues such as applying for study permits.

The reason we won't be covering those questions is because for the immigration question in Canada, you have to be a licensed immigration advisor to answer questions about the application process for study permits. And neither Jane nor I is licensed. So what I will do is I will put a link in the chat to the resources at the Center for International Experience has for students, including advisors that you can you can book a chat with if the information on the page isn't enough. So there is that link for any international students who have questions about study permits.

As far as course enrollment is concerned, we don't cover that because it looks very different from department to department and even from program to program within the department. So your home graduate unit is where you'll need to address any questions about course selection and enrollment. So a quick introduction. Our special guest today is Doctor Jane Freeman or Professor Jane Freeman, Director of the Graduate Center for Academic Communication, and she's going to give you a much better picture of what the GCAC does than I could. So I'll hand it over to Jane for today's session.

Thanks, Murray. And you might want to just try turning off your mic to see if that helps with the echo. I'm not a hearing an echo at my end. I hope it's all right for all of you. Those of you who are in the session welcome, and it's lovely to have a chance to talk to you. I'm here to tell you a little bit about the Graduate Center for Academic Communication. Our unit is housed in the School of Graduate Studies and everything we offer is only for U of T's graduate students and there's no charge for anything we offer. You've already paid tuition.

And our mandate is to help graduate students increase their power of communication for grant writing, thesis writing, presentations, research article publication. So some of the kinds of communication you might not have done too much until you came to Graduate School. Just as a bit of a picture, last year we saw between 10,000 and 11,000 PhD students from 82 different PhD programs.

We have what's called a modular curriculum, which means we've designed the curriculum to have stuff happening all the time. Some of it is short, like a workshop for an hour and a half. Some of it is longer, like a three day boot camp or a one week course. Some of it is 2 hours a day for once a week for six weeks. Of course, like that module courses and these are all.

Sorry.

Austin, are you OK? Rory, it looks like people. Oh, Stacy can hear.

Austin, can you hear me now?

OK.

I'm getting a lot of messages from people saying that they can hear, so I think it's isolated to Austin's computer. I'm keeping my mic off as much as possible to avoid echo.

OK. Thanks, Rory.

So we've got these different types of offerings, and I think that will make more sense to you once you start seeing the nature of what we do. So here are some of our sample courses. We have courses on navigating the publishing process for grad students who may not have published articles before and on writing grants like for the SHARK, Chr, and NCERT proposals. We're going to talk more about those in a minute. Many of you, I know until I started my doctorate, I'd never applied for a national grant.

But they're worth a lot of money and some departments require students to apply. So if you've never had any experience writing grants, we have an intensive 6 hour course in August to help you get started with that. And you can meet with people one-on-one. I'll talk more about that in a minute. We of course, is on thesis writing and on prewriting strategies. And that course is designed to help you get organize your research materials and be sure you're taking notes as effectively as possible. Strategies for organizing large volumes of material and synthesizing.

Data, we have courses on science journalism and oral presentation skills and on the right of your screen you can see some of our workshops. We offered more than 50 workshops last year. Really a wide range of topics on writing lit reviews or writing Ogs. That's the Ontario graduate student proposal, AI in the modern scholars. So we've got workshops on Copilot and on ChatGPT and academic writing. Some of the things that Gen. AI can do for us and some of the things it does very poorly or things to be aware of.

Preparing a 3 minute thesis presentation. So you can see there's all sorts of variation. Now you can see that we offer a course and a workshop on writing grant proposals. The difference is depth. The grant writing courses are six hours long. You meet with lots of other students who are also writing grants. Then there are tutorials that are smaller and there are one-on-one appointments to which you can bring your draft proposal for individual feedback. The workshop is much thinner. It's only 90 minutes long and it doesn't give you a chance to submit anything. So you need to decide how much time you want to spend and what sorts of topics you want to focus on.

Here's just an example of some of the workshops that we offered in the spring on using online language tools for your writing and on making podcasts as an academic student and developing effective note taking strategies. So we made a lot of really proactive graduate students who are eager to develop their skills as researchers and as writers and speakers.

As I mentioned, our our curriculum is modular and what that means is we offer the same things repeated throughout the year so that a student who is giving an oral presentation in a class in September can get help then and a student who's giving an oral presentation class in February can get help then. So you can see on this slide in front of you that our course modules are offered five times a year. We have 5 sessions and you can take a course in each of the sessions if you like, or you can only take a course in September and not take a course until May or take no courses.

You can see we offer workshops through the whole year, except in the summer we have a writing center to which you can come one-on-one to meet someone. It's not a proofreading service, but it gives you very specific feedback on the sorts of writing challenges you may be facing. And that now is a bit out of date here because that actually even goes a bit through the summer. We often are invited to give guest lectures in departments by invitation. We have boot camps for writing dissertations and writing research articles, and those are fun there. People get together for three days or two days and have a combination of silent writing time and instructions so that they can have an intensive experience of, of seeing.

What what others are doing and getting encouragement. We also have these courses right here. You can see that are in August and these are our four intents of courses. We have 4 intensive courses and I'm going to talk about those more just before the end of the presentation. So another way to think about what we do or another way we think about what we do is helping students from the beginning of their degree to the end of their degree. Obviously, you're all experts, you're all sophisticated students or you would not have been able to get into U of T.

But even as a sophisticated student who's got good grades, you may never have written a grant proposal. You may be doing your pH D in a third language or a second or a fourth language. You may not have lived in an English speaking environment. And so some of your concerns might be around your your conversational English. You might already be publishing papers but have had less experience living in an English speaking environment. And so we've got courses and workshops that are really designed for people at different stages. So here we can see.

The academic conversation skills course and graduate writing and the grant writing courses, those are very popular students or courses for incoming students because students need help with those sorts of things right away. And then later we have workshops on things like preparing to defend your doctoral thesis. So as incoming students, you don't need to worry about the things that are coming later. But I really encourage you to familiarize ourselves with yourselves with what we offer and think about what kind of help might be most useful to you right now.

So I've mentioned a couple of times these August courses because these ones are designed for incoming students and so you are our target audience. The first one listed here, Academic Conversation Skills, is a five day course. We meet for 15 hours, so from 9:00 till 12:00 every day, Monday to Friday, from the 12th to the 16th of August. And it's a combination of large group sessions and small group seminars with lots of discussion. It's all these are all online because people will still be living where you're currently living. Most people haven't arrived.

To Toronto yet by this time, but the goal of this course is to help prepare you to participate in conversations in your departments, in your clubs, in your classrooms, in your labs with more confidence and more ease so.

Conversations are culturally influenced. The ways that conversations happen in some cultures are not the same as in other cultures. Things like would you ask a supervisor a question or wait to be asked?

Would you interrupt? Does interruption show that you're enthusiastic, or does it show that you're impolite? So some of the problems with conversational challenges arise because we don't share similar assumptions. But also conversations use a lot of idiomatic expressions and unformal informal uses of the language that you might not see so much in reading. So if you speak English as a second, third or fourth language, and if you feel you're in any way nervous about your.

Spoken English or you're listening English. This is a course designed for you and the you. The registration for that course is open now and we only ask that people not register unless they're able to participate for the full 15 hours because you'll be in small groups and meeting people in your department and people in other departments. And so it's a very highly interactive course. The other three courses you see there are for the what are called the Tri Council grants. The federal government in Canada has three granting agencies.

The Canadian Institute for Health Research, Chr, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada SHARK and the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada, N Cirque, and many departments require their graduate students to apply for one of these three awards. Depending on your field, you can't apply for more than one or you'll be disqualified. So we know that many new students and many returning students have not yet won a grant.

They're about, they're very valuable. The doctoral grants as of this year will be worth $40,000 a year and the Masters awards are worth $27,000 a year. So everybody wants to win them. And in these courses you get a chance to see samples of previous winners, to get explicit instruction on the do's and don'ts of grant writing, and to participate in small tutorials as well as the lectures and to have a one-on-one appointment. So the way you register for those courses is through our website.

And you can go, those courses are open for registration now and you can just go and, and click on the link and the so first, the next steps, I would encourage you to check out our website. As I mentioned, the course registration for the August courses is open now. September course registration won't open until later in August. We do have pre recorded videos available on our website. So if you're interested in going and looking at those, we've got probably 30 or 40 pre recorded videos if you're interested in seeing those.

And our live workshops will start in September. We offer many workshops through the year and we offer them in three formats, live online, live in person and pre recorded. And I would encourage you also to join our listserv. Here's our website. And you can click on these buttons to get more information on any of the things that I've just mentioned, the courses or the workshops. And here's some contact information. So our website.

We are on Instagram and we send out a message on Instagram whenever we're doing a new workshop. So if you want to follow us on Instagram, you can sign up or if you want to be on our list or if we only send one message a week and that the listserv doesn't really get active until October or rather until August when we start saying course registration opens next week. Or here's a here's the topic of our workshops for this week. So I'll leave that slide up so you can see John Hudson is our program coordinator and he is on holiday at the moment, but he'll be back on July 22nd.

So if you try to register and you have any complications with your U Tour ID or your ability to register, he will be able to help you as soon as he's back. But in the meantime, it's wonderful to get a chance to talk to you about what we do. And I hope I get a chance to meet lots of you in person or online in the fall term. So I'll stop there so that we have lots of opportunity for questions or discussion of any aspect of what I've said.

Yes.

Thank you so much Jane And Jane, are you still hearing an echo when I talk?

OK. I'll be brief then. Thank you. I'm going to start approving questions that will start showing up in the chat and you can just answer them verbally. So if you follow the chat on the right hand side.

OK, OK.

Will these proposal writing workshops be available again at a later time? No, they won't because the deadlines for the grant proposal work, the grant proposals are mid to late September. So we used to offer these courses in September starting after Labor Day when people were here, we offered them in person. But the problem is that the granting agencies moved their deadlines earlier. So now the deadlines for some departments are the 17th of September or the 28th of September. And so students wanted us to move the workshops earlier so that.

They have an opportunity between the time of the workshop and the time of the course and the deadline to really work on their proposals. Now we do offer a master's shirt proposal. Those of you who are entering A2 year master's, you would be applying this year for whatever, for funding for whatever work you're doing as of starting September 2025. So you apply in 24 for funding to start in 2025. So if you will still be a master's student, then you'd be applying for a master's award and those the deadline for those is December the 1st.

So we do have a shirk masters course that is offered a little bit later, but our doctoral courses are all right now because of the early deadlines.

Is the August workshop on Shirk application suitable for master students? Yes, it is. As I said, there will be a separate masters course that's later. And we find, if you're like me, when I started my master's degree, I didn't have a project yet and so I needed some time in my masters to start to think about what I wanted to research. But some students come to grad school and they already have a very clear my project in mind for their masters.

So I teach the shirt course and I do talk about both the masters and the pH D awards, but the the emphasis tends to be on the PhD awards there because the deadlines are coming up very soon and there is a separate masters course. So you're welcome to take the August 1 or wait and take the later one.

Do you do faculty specific sessions to? Do you mean do we teach faculty members? I'm not sure if that's what you mean. I have worked as a consultant for with lots of.

Lots of faculty members on grant writing for Chr and N Cirque and shirk. I don't know if that's what you mean, but I have worked with faculty. I don't. We don't teach faculty in GCC, we focus on grad students.

Norley is an incoming student in M Ed in higher education, a professional master's degree, coursework based. Will you be admitted into the grant writing course for this year? You're welcome to take it, Norley, but you can't apply for.

A research award for a course based degree. So the the Troy Council awards are specifically for people who are doing research degrees because you have to describe a research project. So because you don't have a research project and you're not embarking on a research degree, you might wait. I would certainly say at least not to take the PhD one because it won't be so relevant to you. That said, you're very welcome to take it. We've had some students who take it a year before they feel ready to apply.

Because they want to have in their mind what kind of questions do I need to answer? What sorts of information do I need to gather? And this questions like how does your work relate to other work in the field and the rationale for your method. So seeing samples of what winners look like can be very useful even if you're not applying this year. So you're welcome, but it won't be targeted at you is the quick answer.

Sessions for engineering in particular, which sessions are.

Sorry I I switched my mic off to avoid the echo. Alicia was asking if you tailor sessions to the faculty in which the student is studying. I've recommended that she choose based on granting agency.

Absolutely. Yeah. You're the, the Troy Council will disqualify you if you apply for two of these awards. You may only apply for one. So if you're in engineering, you should be applying for NSIRC. If you're in Health Science, you should be applying for Cir. If you're in social science and humanities, you should be applying for shirk. Now, there are a couple of fields that kind of straddle. So for psychology, for example, it might be more like social science or it might be more like Health Science. And in those situations, you can contact the awards office at the School of Graduate Studies.

To be sure that the award you're applying for is the right one, you can give a description of your project and or you can contact the agency directly and get instructions on which award you should be applying for. But yes, you should definitely take just the course that's relevant to you because the structure is different. The Chr application has different parts than the shirk application, so you should only be registering for the course that is for the particular award that you're applying for.

If you apply for a grant this year, would you also be able to apply the year after or is it one time? Great question. You can. You can apply until you win. Once you get an award then you hold it for the certain number of years you're eligible. So absolutely apply this year and if you're not successful then apply again next year. I did that myself. When I started my degree. I confessed I had never heard of shirk. I had no idea what it was and then I was told we should all be trying to apply. So I tried, but I didn't have a supervisor yet and I didn't have a project yet. So I was a strong student with a lot of enthusiasm and some good ideas, but I didn't have a project and I wasn't successful that year.

But through the year, I started to narrow down and refine my ideas and I was able to be successful when I applied the second time. So I'm I'm a personal example of the value of of taking that approach.

I'm not familiar with Cirque and Circus. How could they help you with future academic employment opportunities? Is there a web page to introduce them and help you to choose which is the most suitable? Yes, if you just type in one of those acronyms. If you type in Shirk to Google, you'll find the Shirk website. Look under funding opportunities and look for the training because the training is for students. Shirk also funds faculty members and postdoctoral fellows. And same with Encirc and Chr. They all they all fund.

At the masters doctoral faculty and post doctoral levels. So you're looking for training opportunities for master students or doctoral students and the eligibility is by field of study. So N Cirque funds hard science, physics, computer science, engineering those fields. Chr relates to anything to do with health. Now if your health study is say a socio cultural examination of.

The impact of a certain new health policy that was probably going to be social science. So that would be under shirk. Social science and humanities are under shirk, but in terms of are they valuable for future employment? Absolutely. When I won my shirk, one of the slides I have in my in my shirt course, it talks about the benefits of applying for these even if you aren't competitive this year. And one of them is that it allows you to talk to potential supervisors putting together a draft proposal allows you to get.

Feedback from experts in the field and the department to say, can you let me know if I sound like I'm on the right track or have I provided clear rationale for the method why I'm wanting to do it this way? Or are there any areas of research related to my topic that I'm not mentioning that I should be aware of? So writing a proposal can can really facilitate fruitful discussion. And another benefit, a benefit of winning is it's very it jumps off your CV when you're applying for academic jobs.

Because universities want to hire faculty members who have a track record of bringing in funding, especially in the, well, in all fields. But in the sciences, most engineering and Health Science labs are funded in large part through faculty grants that hire students so that there are grad students and postdoctoral fellows in the labs. And that much of that money comes from the Troy Council and sometimes from industry funds as well. But yeah, it's definitely good and.

Practicing grant proposal writing gives you more chance to practice grant proposal writing. I'd also encourage you to contact your departmental secretaries and ask whether incoming graduate students are required to apply for a Tri council grant in your department. Because many departments require students to to apply for one of these grants and you don't want to wait until the first week of September to find out and then find that The thing is due in three weeks. So I I applaud your initiative in coming today because this is the kind of information that's really.

Useful to get early and This is why we offer the courses in August. OK, I see some some list links there. Thanks. Worry, is the information covered in today's session applicable for developmental psychology and students to participate and apply? Now? The M Ed is a professional degree and so if it doesn't have a research component then it's not eligible. But if it does have a made like a dissertation, a master's thesis.

Then it would be eligible. So you could ask in your department. It depends on the requirements of your particular program because these awards are exclusively for students who are conducting big research projects. And what you have to do in the application is describe the project you're proposing and how you're going to do it and what how it will relate to work that's already been done.

We're getting a lot of funding questions that I might not be able to answer. What sorts of things?

Some you'd be fine with regarding Tri Council and some not. I would encourage students looking for funding opportunities to watch the recording of the awards webinar.

Yes.

Yeah, there's, if you go to the SGS website and you click on awards, the awards office has a page there that leads you to different funding opportunities. The three awards that I've been talking about, Shirtsy and Cirque, you need to be a permanent resident or a Canadian citizen to be eligible for those. However, you are eligible to apply for an Ontario graduate scholarship, the OGS and we have a workshop on on writing OGS proposals as well, but many students who are applying for the OGS also take these courses.

Because the course is fundamentally are about grantsmanship. They're about pitching a research idea and describing why it's valuable and how you're going to do it and why it's worth doing. So that's the same thing you have to do in an OG. So even if you are applying those skills to a different, a different type of grant, we, we often have students who take the courses because they want to learn more about grammar. There will be a workshop for the OGS application. It's a little bit later.

Marga, because the OGS is not due at the same time as the shirk or the Shark CI chart answer, the department's administer the OGS awards. And so you have to ask in your department, when are the OGS applications due in developmental psychology? When are the applications due in chemical engineering? Because you'll learn different departments have different deadlines, but they're typically in about March, I think.

So we can have an OGS workshop later because people aren't rushing to submit an OGS proposal right at the same time.

Are there any questions about any of the other courses that I mentioned or any of our other workshops? 11 point, I should have mentioned that I didn't. Some of our really popular courses, so for example, oral presentation skills, we have a lot of students apply for those. So we may have three or four sections of the same course at the same time. So when you go to register, the course covers the same material whether it's Section 1 or Section 3, but it's offered by a different teacher and at a different time.

So part of our goal in doing that is to keep the session small so people have a lot of time to practice and get feedback on their work. But also we want to accommodate a range of schedules. So some some of the sections will be online, some will be on person in person because some are near people are nearby and they want to practice presenting in front of human beings and not in front of a screen. But the same material is covered in any section. So you would just sign up for one section of the course.

Just put one more in the chat.

Play.

Let's see if I can do this without too much echo. I would like to say a huge thank you to Jane who's sharing on topic and adjacent to topic information with some really great advice about how to write grant applications and apply for awards. This is a huge part of being a researcher is being able to talk about your research in such a way that explains its importance and gets you the funding that it deserves to have. How awful is the sound, Jane? Bad. OK.

So alright then I'll just say that we're welcome to well.

Yeah, So sorry, Jane, if if my if my thank you to you sounds terrible. It's still sincerely meant. So thank you for sharing your expertise today and everyone who's joined today. Congratulations, you are you've made a smart choice of getting information in advance and we really look forward to welcoming you to Toronto in late August or early September. So on that note, we're going to close today's session and have a great rest of your day.