Academic Skills Workshops
These workshops are now delivered online via Collaborate Ultra. All students will receive an email from GUPSA to register. Those who register for these sessions will then be emailed a link to the session join Nina Ginsberg online.
Want to improve your academic skills? GUPSA provides a FREE series of 2 hour ACA/HACKA Academic Skills workshops to support your learning.
Presented by Nina Ginsberg, there are 6 workshops in the series: The Postgrad Critical Discussion Toolbox, Successful Academic Writing for International Students, Structure, Coherence & Cohesion, Extend Your Academic Vocab, Get That Journal Article Published and Being an Effective Researcher. Each workshop in the series is stand alone so you can do all or one or in between as appropriate for you. The workshops are open to both coursework and Higher Degree Research (HDR) students although the Journal Article workshop is probably more relevant to HDRs and other students with a substantial research component to their degree. The second workshop is also more suitable for international students and students for whom English is a second language.
The Postgrad Critical Discussion Toolbox
Be that student in class who always has something interesting to say! This interactive session shows you how to initiate confident discussions and contribute intelligent and challenging ideas, evaluations and explorations of key themes in your course – in ways that are surprisingly easy to do. This session provides powerful strategies to increase critical thinking and will help you generate ideas and thoughtful responses in tutorials, discussions and debates. These techniques also help when preparing presentations and other assessments.
Academic Writing and Sentence Structure
This workshop covers the different types of writing, how to get started writing and how to turn everyday writing into academic prose. Techniques covered are academic writing prompts, how to improve academic style, some no-fuss academic paragraph structures and the fundamentals of the 4 types of sentences all postgraduate students need to know.
Cohesion & Coherence
This workshop covers the most important academic writing techniques to increase clear and logical connections between ideas and paragraphs. In this session, we look at paragraph unity using TEEEL and theme & rheme structures and how to successfully apply academic cohesion, parallelism and transitions for maximum flow, clarity and impact.
Extend your Academic Vocab
Postgrads are expected to be able to write with higher precision and specific academic expression. Building the range and accuracy of your academic vocabulary is fundamental to being a successful academic writer. This session will cover how to increase your academic vocab, how to use new academic words, how to build your own academic/professional glossary and other useful resources that will help your word choices to be more flexible, sophisticated and precise.
Get that journal article published!
This workshop covers tips and advice on preparing an article for publication. Regardless of discipline or content, this workshop will provide key strategies to propel ideas into a draft article, how to develop a draft into a full paper with less stress and strategically polish papers to improve chances of publication. It also includes secret tips on how to upgrade papers for publication
Being an Efficient Researcher
Do you have the study habits and mindset to complete your degree with confidence, clarity and proficiency? All too often, students feel overwhelmed by the workload and expectations required at university. Learning how to bring it all together to proactively manage your work, time and energy is an advanced academic skill. This session covers strategies to establish an efficient daily schedule, develop a sustainable work practice and foster an ‘expert researcher’ mentality.
Register for one or all of the workshops via your student email in either the Nathan series (for Nathan, Logan, Mt Gravatt postgrads) or the Southbank series (for postgrads at the Southbank campuses – QCA, QCGU, Film School, etc).
Nina provides a range of resources for the workshops on her website HERE.
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Other Services
Ongoing GUPSA services:
- Information sharing, online and through Facebook, newsletters and official association communications
- Professional development with seminars and workshops
- Printing credit to coursework postgrads
- Representation of postgrad interests to the university and government
- Social functions
