From the PhD-Odyssey to Project Management

This event is part I of the series. Part II will be on May 5 and May 6.

Doing a PhD is very much related to a hero’s story. Starting highly motivated defining the research topic, PhD-students soon encounter the first obstacles. However, like heroes they will meet someone, a mentor, who will get deeply involved in their training as a researcher. This may be a supervisor or a postdoc. Nevertheless, scientific challenges, technical problems or other aspects will turn out as enemies, threatening the successful and timely completion of the research activities. Very much unexpected, the students will find allies and helpful resources and will finally make progress and publish results. Eventually, with writing the thesis and passing the exam, the future slowly comes into focus. Besides a mentor there are some project management tools, which will help to achieve progress in the different phases of the PhD. Therefore, the objective of this workshop is, to introduce a toolkit which will allow PhD students to • manage the different phases of their PhD effectively, to • understand for whom they are looking for as a mentor, and to

• manage their workload and assess their individual progress. Each method will be trained hands-on their own individual research project, so that at the end of the workshop participants have
• a work-plan for their PhD or a work plan targeting at developing the scientific work-plan for the first TAC-meeting,
• a plan for their training needs and preferences during their PhD,
• a first plan for organising the work of the next three months

Workshop contents

Workshop times are 9:00 to 12:30 with a coffee break of 15 minutes at around 10:30. The workshop room will open at 8:50.

SESSION 1: Getting to know the challenge (3.5 hours)

• The triangle of projects

• Overview on PhD projects and their lifecycle

• Objectives in research projects

SESSION 2: Planning and organising the work (3.5 hours)

• Elements and structure of a work plan

• The Disney method

• Developing the idea for the research project into a first work plan

• Visualization of the work plan

SESSION 3: Motivation, stakeholders, promotors (3.5 hours)

• Motivation

• Understanding the stakeholders in your project

• Barriers and risks

SESSION 4: Monitoring progress and personal development (3.5 hours)

• The personal development in a PhD: skills and competences

• Monitoring progress

• Tools to organise the daily work and the next three months

Transfer of workshop contents into practice

The results from the workshop are finetuned to support participants in preparing their project proposal for the first TAC meeting.