Dr Sarabajaya Kumar, with Professor Patrick Dunleavy and other colleagues.

This course is aimed at first-year students registered for the MPhil/PhD. It offers you the opportunity to extend your networks with students in other departments and reflect on your research plans in a series of thematic workshops, suitable for students across all disciplines and covering key topics arising in the early stages of your work.

Booking is essential for each individual workshop that you wish to attend, and should be done online via lse.ac.uk/lse/training

The workshops offered are:

Career options for PhD students - an introduction to the various career options open to LSE PhD students.

Thinking creatively and mind-mapping your original research - explores what originality means in relation to your research question and how to delimit your topic appropriately; features mind-mapping expert Tony Buzan and renowned LSE academics talking about their own research.

Using online resources for literature reviews - expert advice from LSE Library and academic staff.

Purposeful networking - guidance on effective relationship building from the very start of your research journey.

Working with and managing your relationship with your supervisor - explores the roles and responsibilities of each participant in the student-supervisor relationship and discusses how you can get the most from it.

The macro-structure of the thesis - structuring your thesis to achieve high core content, logical sequencing of ideas and an efficient research process.

Managing your work-life balance - an introduction to life-coaching and time-management tools that you can use to meet the important milestones in both your doctorate and your life.

 

Patrick Dunleavy, Authoring a PhD: How to plan, draft, write and finish your doctoral thesis or dissertation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), chapters 1-4. To get maximum value from the workshops, participants should read relevant chapters before attending the session. There are multiple copies in the Library's Course Collection.

This course is non-examinable.