As a graduate student, it's normal to experience a sense of panic when looking for potential funding for your research. It's also normal to be unsure where to turn to for help. We sat down with Dolly Grewal, Graduate Awards Advisor with Concordia’s School of Graduate Studies, who provided us with some insight on the do’s and don’ts for graduate scholarship applications. This blog post will provide sources for funding opportunities, describe the best way to structure your application, provide tips on how to create good rapport with potential references and suggest ways to highlight not only your academic credentials but link them to the passions behind your research. Read more

This week we sat down with Anja Novkovic who is pursuing a Master’s of Science in Geography, Urban and Environmental Studies. Along with being the GradProSkills ‘Success in Graduate School’ workshop facilitator, Anja is a researcher, a writer, and an artist—with experience in performing spoken word poetry and also incorporating cartography and art into her research. She is also deeply intrigued by storytelling as a practice and as a way to make sense of the spaces that we encounter in our day-to-day lives. Read more

We would like to introduce you to Nicole Taylor, a second-year Masters student in the Media Studies program within the Faculty of Arts and Science. She’s also the Online Communication Assistant for GradProSkills, responsible for all the social media updates, writing for the blog and designing promotional materials, among other things. Nicole originally comes from Toronto, Ontario, having completed a Bachelors in Communication Studies at York University. Read more

For a lot of people doing academic work, Microsoft PowerPoint is the go-to software for visualizing a presentation. When used efficiently, PowerPoint has the capabilities to attractively disseminate information, engage audiences and bolster an argument. Read more

This week we would like to introduce you to Tuğba Nur Öztürk, a fourth-year Concordia PhD Candidate within the Physics Department, and the IT Workshop Leader for GradProSkills. Tuğba enjoys helping other students discover how to code and visualize their data, which stems from her own experience using scripting languages such as Python, R, Bash and Octave for her research, and her fondness for teaching within interdisciplinary fields. Her own research involves working on the molecular modelling of a calcium channel using Molecular Dynamics simulations. “I like the idea of membrane proteins being complex little machines to study,” she states, “both experimentally and computationally.” Read more

The objective of an abstract is to summarize your paper or project, it is an outline of what is to come. Not only should an abstract provide an overview of the information that can be found in your paper or talk, but it should also be captivating. The first glimpse of your writing comes from this brief summary of your research. With that being said, this blog post will address the importance of writing a compelling abstract, how to structure your ideas and why you need to pay attention to keywords. Read more

We would like to introduce you to Felipe Merino Gordo, another one of our participants for the Three Minute Thesis & Project Competition. Felipe is a first-year Concordia graduate student completing a Master of Applied Science (MASc) within the department of Building, Civil & Environmental Engineering. He came to Montreal from Chile about a year ago with his partner and infant son. His initial decision to pursue a Masters at Concordia University was influenced by a professor who completed his PhD at Concordia and moved back to Chile to teach Building Science. Read more

On March 15th, 2018, twenty-five participants took to the stage to deliver an engaging three-minute pitch about their research to an eager audience for the annual Concordia Three Minute Thesis & Project Competition. From speeches about diabetes and a protein that may counteract some of the damage the disease causes to finding out what makes us want to drink alcohol, each Concordia graduate student showed their passion for their academic pursuits with enthusiasm and eloquence. We caught up with Kenechukwu Nnodu, the Runner-up for the Masters presentations, to discuss his experience participating in the event. Read more

You may think that having only three minutes to speak about your work takes away from the vital points of your research, but it's actually zoning in on the specific importance of your theories, your ideas and your findings. In honour of the Three Minute Thesis & Project Competition, we thought it would be useful to create a blog post that discusses how 3MT invokes the use of storytelling to encourage graduate research to be engaging, succinct and relatable. Read more

An important consideration when doing a literature review is how you are going to organize the information that you obtain. Without a proper organizational system, you may find yourself getting overwhelmed. This is the second installment to our blog series discussing writing a literature review. This post will go over different ways you can organize the sources and information that you’ve obtained. Read more