Overcoming Isolation During your PhD & CUSO video series “Doing a PhD… And then what?”
CUSO interview-video series “Doing a PhD… And then what?” with tips for PhD students: here I am talking about overcoming isolation and about soft skills!
Category: Soft Skills
Graduate Centers, Career Centers and Soft Skills Programs for PhD students and Postdocs in Swiss Universities – Resource
A resource of graduate centers, career centers and transferable skills (soft skills) programs for PhD students and postdocs in the main cities of Switzerland
Coaching program for PhD Students in Fribourg (CH)
The Centre Did@cTIC of UniFr offers professional coaching training to its PhD students, with group and individual coaching sessions, in English, for free!
Effective brainstorming skills for academic lab meetings
Here a detailed technique for group brainstorming, a powerful team-building tool which can also teach us a lot about improving normal lab meetings in academia
Project Management resource for PhD students and supervisors
Project management is about supervisors and students finding a way to work together. Find here a selection of interesting blog posts and free templates.
Guidelines to draw a timeline of your PhD
Gantt charts are a highly visual and attractive medium to foster project management discussions. Download for free my Excel file and make your own timeline
Are Gantt charts useful for PhD students?
Yes, but there are some drawbacks. Use it to visualize your whole PhD or to plan the next 2 months. Stay flexible and realistic, adjust a Gantt chart with time.
Let’s try to plan a realistic To-Do list for the week
Plan only 60% of the week and clarify what you truly “need to have” done versus the “nice to have”. Tips in time and project management
How to use retro-planning to plan your PhD graduation
To plan for the different steps of writing, submitting and defending a thesis. The big difference comes when you to take the time to write it down, visualize it
How project management can help reducing PhD students’ anxieties
Finally being able to visualize my graduation and to apply true project management techniques helped me feeling so much better. Supervisors and students need to clarify their long-term expectations
Do senior scientists acknowledge the importance of early soft skills training for their PhD students?
an EMBO survey where senior scientists were asked to rate which soft skills they think are more important for their PhD students, and which ones they rate as more important for themselves
Lack of communication about soft skills training programs in academia
it is only by welcoming direct discussions about soft skills within institutes and with all academics’ levels that new PhD students can find the training and mental support they need
Where can I find soft skills training in academia?
as a new PhD student, I lacked the academic jargon to look for training programs which could have helped me. Use this article to open up the discussion around you.
How to know which soft skills training is best for my career?
You can’t know for sure what is best, but it’s OK, we’re all in the same mess. It’s like an experiment for yourself, it will help no matter what life brings you
Academics: you already have more soft skills than you think and you can prove it
Create your Skills Portfolio for when it will be time to apply for the next position, and to remember all the shitty stuff which happened to you in academia
What are soft skills for academics ?
What I’m going to do with my life??
Looking at our soft skills is a good way to start: self-awareness to boost our self-confidence
Managing professional relationships
I didn’t even need to draw all my supervisor’s professional connections to realize that I was just one other tiny line for him. Was that depressing? …
How a doctoral program saved my PhD
Evans et al., 2018 “Evidence for a mental health crisis in graduate education”
My doctoral program provided me with moral support and work organization skills
