Depending on your quals committee, you may not know the questions that you’ll be asked on your qualifying exam before you actually take it. Or maybe you will know what questions you’ll have to choose from, but you won’t have any hand in designing them. Or maybe you will be working closely with your advisor to determine the questions you will be asked. No matter the situation you’re in, though, it can be helpful to brainstorm probable quals questions. You can use them to organize your reading; you can use them for practice exams; you can even use them to gently nudge your committee members into asking about specific things. This workshop will examine some generic types of quals questions to give you a framework for designing your own and will cover strategies for organizing your quals prep to make the process fruitful and sustainable.
Developing a research question, like every other aspect of a research project—working with sources, the interpretation of data, the writing, the editing—takes work, and is a skill that you can practice, refine, and personalize. This workshop will provide a short primer on how to come up with a workable research question, as well as tools to help you further refine your research question so that it better connects to ongoing conversations within your field.
Literature reviews are among the most challenging writing tasks that graduate students have to complete. They are also among the most common. In both academic and professional settings, critically evaluating a body of prior analytical work is something that writers need to do to contextualize their own research and make space for their intended contributions. This workshop will lead students through repeatable steps for scaffolding a literature review from the initial organization of sources to the development of an argumentative thesis about the state of existing scholarship.
The internet will surely be the end of us all, but while it's around you should get good at using it for research. If you ever have trouble finding resources for your papers (navigating results on the library website, getting too much garbage, not finding enough sources, figuring out whether a source is reliable or not, etc.) stop by.
In a previous life, I was the assistant editor for the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. My title was inflated, but I still got enough out of it to learn you something about what happens when you submit an article to a scholarly publication. If you want a better picture of the process of academic review, or if you have specific questions about how journals work, come visit.
Although seminar papers are great places to start workshopping your arguments, they are often too parochial—too narrowly focused, too narrowly tailored to a specific purpose—to submit to outside audiences. This workshop will look at specific examples of journal/conference guidelines and published articles to give you some suggestions for how to frame your work for new audiences and venues.
Here is a set of annotated articles that we looked at during the (3/8-9/2023) webinars. Each article comes paired with the corresponding author guidelines from the journal that published it.
If you’ve never seen a physical copy of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, it is 427 pages (including the index) covering everything from the principles of scholarly writing and publishing to the way that citations and references should be handled for dozens of different source-types. That’s a lot to remember for everything that you write. But not every professor you work with will care equally about all parts of the APA manual. Some professors just use “APA style” as a kind of shorthand for the things they really care about. This workshop will cover (what I consider to be) the major issues that graduate students writing papers for coursework should consider: citations and references, conciseness and clarity, general formatting, and style.
Here is a summary of what we went over.
Here are recordings for the 10/3/2023 and 10/6/2023 webinars.
One of the most challenging things about writing a prospectus is that there are no obvious guidelines for what makes a good one. A lot of factors can shape what you should aim for:
Different fields/sub-fields have different (and sometimes conflicting) expectations of what should be included. Some professors consider a prospectus akin to a working document and some expect it to function as the first or second chapter of your eventual dissertation.
It isn’t always clear how broad you should go with your literature review or how deep with your methodology.
There are many ways to justify the significance of your work and it can be hard to decide what to focus on.
And what’s all this about “theoretical frameworks?” (seriously… I’m asking this one… what does a separate theoretical framework section do that a lit review and method combo doesn’t…someone free me from this burden)
The type and amount of reading that you are assigned in graduate school can seem daunting. Many students also worry that they will struggle to keep up because of the way that they read: "I read slowly," "I zone out," "I have a hard time remembering what I've read." If this sounds like you, stop by. This workshop will detail specific, repeatable strategies for getting more out of your reading in graduate school without suggesting that you learn how to speed read. (Especially helpful for new students or students getting ready to prep for qualifying exams)
It’s not uncommon for students to receive comments on their papers suggesting that their writing isn’t “academic” enough. Especially if you didn’t go directly into a graduate program after undergrad, this kind of feedback can be confusing. More to the point, it can make you feel like you’re missing something that everyone else gets. For what it’s worth, I doubt that’s the case—and they pay me to do this, so that has to count for some kind of authority. Lots of professors use the phrase “academic writing” (or “graduate-level writing”) to signal a list of expectations about how you should write; not every professor has the same list and I bet that some would struggle to come up with a detailed set of guidelines. And that kind of makes sense—but it also means that you might find yourself wondering what they want from you and only knowing that it isn’t what you’ve given them so far. So, let’s try to straighten some of this out. I’ll be going over repeatable argumentative structures, types of claims, hedging techniques, and some structure stuff. Feel free to come by with questions/samples/examples/etc.
Literature reviews are among the most challenging writing tasks that graduate students are required to complete. They are also among the most ubiquitous. In both academic and professional settings, critically evaluating a body of prior analytical work is something that writers need to do in order to contextualize their own research and make space for their contributions. This workshop will lead students through repeatable steps for scaffolding a literature review from the initial organization of sources to the development of an argumentative thesis about the state of existing scholarship.
(tbh we just started with lit reviews and kind of went all over the place–stuff on effective reading strategies, library/database research, argumentation)
Seems like plagiarism is a big deal lately. We've got popular Youtubers being taken to task for unethically churning out mostly-copied content, and university admins being pressed (often in bad faith, sometimes not) for problems in their research and writing. Not to mention the warnings you may hear from professors. All this to say that it is easy to imagine a plagiarism charge like some kind of big cat in the woods: You're just writing along, minding your own business and then boom, mountain lion attack… or Turnitin… whatever. But that's not really how it works. I meet with a lot of students who are very nervous about plagiarism; I meet with far fewer students who can express exactly why it is that they are nervous apart from "I've been told to be nervous about it." So, let' s turn the temperature down a bit. This webinar will provide an overview of what constitutes plagiarism (including debates on the boundaries of the issue and how to navigate them), as well as a general guide for citing and paraphrasing other scholars' work in your own writing.