Grad students face many challenges, such as: knowing how to start and manage their project, where to find and how to use available resources, how to balance their time, how to navigate professional relationships and how to clearly communicate their project to clarify their own understanding and build their research community. Answers? Look no further than ISTEP’s TEP5500: Research Methods and Project Execution.
Course instructor, Professor Lydia Wilkinson delivers a learning experience, which provides a space for students to develop strategies to address these challenges, beginning with students taking inventory of their current skills, to identify gaps they need to overcome, and to share strategies which will help them succeed. This focus on personal goalsetting ensures that the lessons from this course continue to support a graduate student’s success throughout the span of their degree.
“This course sharpens students thinking about their project and improves graduate student efficiency by giving them a designated space to plan and refine their project”, says ISTEP Professor Lydia Wilkinson. “Specifically, the course helps students to: define their research problem; effectively design and conduct their research; clearly communicate the rationale, results and conclusions of a project; and develop a strategic plan for their graduate education.”
Ideally, the grad student will already have a research focus, and be in the early stages of their project. Students often struggle with where to start on their thesis project, and this course helps them in the early stages to better understand and organize their research, and to map out their project from the first stages to its execution. In this way, the course makes the research process less daunting and helps students break it down into manageable chunks.
A key benefit of the course stems from the community of supportive peers who are at the same point in their research. Students benefit from communicating their research to their peers – they talk through their project and receive feedback on the clarity of their thinking and communication, but they also benefit from understanding that they’re not alone and that other grad students in engineering are grappling with the same challenges.
This course was designed with input from current graduate students and alumni to ensure consistent instruction in key graduate level skills in order to reduce time to completion and improve efficiency for graduate supervisors.