Webinars for Newly Admitted Graduate Students 2025 - Graduate Centre for Academic Communication

Hello everyone, just wanted to pop in quickly and, uh, let you know that the webinar is scheduled for right now. We are just having some technical difficulties, so we're getting that sorted out. Uh, I'll try to give you updates, umm, as they become available, but I'm trying to help with the technical difficulties right now, so please stay tuned. Sorry about this.

Hello Patrick, I think I've found my way in.

OK, there we go.

Sorry everyone for the delay there, but glad that the camera and mic worked there well. Was it changing the input? Was that what helped me?

No, our program coordinator helped me. I I'll have to have him tell you what he did because I'm not sure what he did.

Yeah.

OK, OK, well, glad you could make it. So I'll just give the quick welcome. My name is Patrick. I'm facilitating the presentation today from the Graduate Center for Academic Communication. We have Doctor Jane Freeman here who is here to present on what the CCAC office does and what they are. This meeting will be recorded and a recording will be available at the latest.

End of next week because due to our systems it takes a little while for the system to record everything and sync everything up. The slides, the audio, the chat.

So our recording will be available and if you have any questions, we ask that you hold it to the very end as there is a good chance that the question might be answered during the presentation. And if the the chat is set set up so that you can see us and the slides, but participants won't be able to turn on their cameras or mics. So if you do have a question, please feel free to type in the chat and we'll get to it at the end. Thank you. Over to you, Jane.

Hey, thanks so much, Patrick. Uh, hello. As Patrick said, I'm the director of the Graduate Center for Academic Communication. On campus, we're known as GCAC. Uh, we're part of the School of Graduate Studies, and we offer a range of free programming only for graduate students at U of T related to improving your academic writing and speaking at high levels.

Can you forward the slides, Patrick?

So there's a URL for us. We offer courses on things like grant proposal writing. For example, if you're applying for the Canadian Institute of Health Research grant, CIHR or NSERC, the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada, or Shirk SSHRC, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Those are three grants offered by the federal government in Canada and you, some of you may be applying for those we.

Courses on writing such grants and We offer advanced speaking courses for people who for whom English is not a first language. We offer courses on preparing to publish and thesis writing prewriting strategies for getting ready to work on large documents like a dissertation or qualified research paper.

We also have boot camps, which are two to three day events where people all come together for certain for a couple days to write and think about writing a research article together or running a research article. Boot camp today and tomorrow, for example, and we also have a writing center.

Patrick, could you forward the slide?

So I really wanted to focus on this particular course because it is designed only for incoming multilingual students for whom English is a subsequent language. It's called academic conversation skills. And as you see here, if you'd like to build more confidence in your speaking in English, listening in English, then this course is for you. So it's only for students who are starting a masters or PhD at U of T in the fall, for whom English is not a first language. And we meet every morning for.

Days in a row from August 5th, 11th to 15th inclusive, from 9 till 12:00 in the morning, Toronto time, we meet and we start each day with a plenary talk by me and then we break. Those talks are not very long. Then we break into smaller groups. So you have lots of time to meet each other and learn various conversational strategies and have lots of chance to talk to each other. So it's a very exciting course because you'll also have a chance to meet students from all over the world who like you.

Coming to join grad school at U of T for the first time this September. So to register for that course the the link is there. You do need to register and you can do so by following the instructions at that link. Can I see the next slide?

The next, the only other courses we offer in August, because we offer only four courses in August, most of our courses start in September. And I should say these courses are all free to you because you are a UFT grad student. So the the fees are already covered in your money. You pay to fees to U of T. So there's no extra charge for any of these. And as I said, they're open only to grad students at U of T and some of you may learn from your departments that you are.

Required to apply for a grant UT has guaranteed funding for doctoral students who are doing a PhD. And if you are eligible for that guaranteed funding, your department may say in order to be eligible in our department, you must apply for an external grant as well and doesn't mean to win one, but you have to at least apply. And if you find that that that situation applies to you and you're not familiar with writing these grants, these are the three grant writing courses.

You need to ask in your department which of these grants should I apply for? If it's not already obvious, If, for example, you're in psychology, it's possible you're applying to Shirk or it's possible you're applying to CIHR. If you're in chemical engineering, it's going to be pretty clear that you're applying to NSERC. So if you're not sure whether you should be applying or to which one, you can find out within your department. And then if it turns out you are going to be applying, we have these courses that the Cir.

Hour and 15 minutes every day for four days. The other two courses are for three days, two hours a day. And so that's the class time. But then after the classes, we have a lot of one-on-one appointments. You can sign up to get individual feedback on your draft proposals. We have tutorials you can join. So although the courses themselves only take place at this time, there's lots of extra support afterwards. So once again, those course registrations are open right now, as is the course registration for the.

This version of the Academic Conversation Skills course, once the term starts, we offer the ACS course in the same course but in a different format, 2 hours a week for six weeks in a row. So maybe you sign up to take it Tuesdays from 2:00 to 4:00 and every Tuesday from 2:00 to 4:00 for six weeks you take that course. And so the the content is the same. If you take it in August, you wouldn't take it then. But we offer it in August because we're trying to help people feel more confident.

About arriving in Canada and listening and speaking in English to people who speak English with different accents and a range of different paces and using a lot of idiomatic expressions that may not be familiar to you. Could I have the next slide? So here are some examples of some of our courses. And as I said, everything is free to you to take non credit course modules. As I mentioned, academic conversation skills we offer throughout the year as well as in.

We've got a course on oral presentation skills that's five weeks long. Strategies on pre writing strategies or course on pre writing strategies for clarifying your ideas before you write. Conventions of graduate writing, achieving flow and clarity, navigating the publishing process, thesis writing. These are non credit courses and they're two hours a week for four to six weeks depending on the length of the course. We offer our courses.

In at 5 times through the years, so the first set starts in September and runs for six weeks.

And then the next set starts late October and runs for the next few weeks. So we have two sessions of our courses in the fall, 2 in the winter, one starting the first or second week of January, the next starting after reading week. And finally the last section of the year is May and June. So let's imagine you want you're going to have a presentation to give in a course next term. We suggest you not take the oral presentation skills course till you're getting ready to prepare that because you'll have a chance.

Class to give a presentation and get feedback. So I wouldn't suggest you take it way when you're not really doing that already. I'd suggest you take it when you're working on that. Same with publishing. If you're, I would encourage you to take that course when you're starting to prepare to publish rather than when you're just thinking about it.

The workshops you can see we also have a range of topics there. These are an hour and a half long. You can take as many of them as you like.

The courses you may take only two at a time, so you could sign up for two courses in.

September and two courses in October, so you can't take too many at once, but the workshops you can take as many as you like and you can see the topics there on writing a thesis or grant proposal, PowerPoint slides. We, we offer 50 workshops a year. So I'm only giving you a few samples of the topics here. Not every every topic, but I see the next slide.

We also have pre recorded workshops and those you can watch at any time. So here are some of the titles of those. And if you go to the GCAC website now and you go to our pre recorded workshop page, you can click on there and you need to register to take to watch the workshop and then you will be given the zoom link to do so. So these you can watch at any time at your convenience.

And the last slide.

So here are some ways to get in touch with us. We do have an Instagram account and we send out messages when workshops are coming up. We also have a list serve and the listserv. We send out messages through the year just once a week to let people know what workshops are coming up the following week or to let people give people a heads up to say when course registration opens for the next round. Right now you can register only for the August courses. Those registrations are open.

For the three grant riding horses and the academic conversation skills course, but the September courses, registration for those will not open until later in August. So we last year students signed up for our programming more than 10,000 times and we saw students from 82 different graduate programs on campus. So our courses and workshops are a wonderful way to encounter students from other departments at U of T, all of whom are doing graduate work. So now I'm happy to take any questions.

If you'd like to type any questions in the chat.

Yes, here we'll give a moment.

If not, uh, I'd like to thank Jane for your time and expertise sharing all of that with us today. Again, this meeting, uh, this presentation will be recorded and posted on the same web page where everyone registered. It will be available by the end of next week. If there is nothing else. Uh, thank you also everyone for watching and, uh, hope you have a good day.

Bye.

OK. Thank you all. Hope to meet you in September or August.