Support for Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Scholars

Welcome to Design & Deliver Grad studio, a workshop series that takes you through the process of planning and designing a spoken academic presentation. If you’re working on a specific presentation, we encourage you to attend all three: start by organizing your ideas in “Planning for and preparing presentations,” learn how to create engaging slides in “Slide Design,” and practice strategies for confidently answering questions in “Defending and Answering Questions.”  

Each workshop will take place over 2.5 hours (with breaks) to build on each other and cover different elements of an effective academic presentation: planning out your messages, supporting your messages with engaging visual support, and answering questions about your work clearly and concisely. You are welcome to attend any workshop you feel is most relevant to you, but we encourage you to attend all three workshops so that you can learn about and plan for all three elements.  

In all three workshops, you’ll be expected to brainstorm, plan, and discuss your own presentation, so it’s best to come with a specific presentation you're working on. If you don’t have a presentation coming up, come prepared to work on an academic presentation (such as a conference presentation or thesis defence) you’re likely to deliver.  

• Thursday, April 24, 2025 - Planning for and preparing presentations 

• Thursday, May 8, 2025 - Slide design 

• Thursday, May 22, 2025 - Defending and Answering Questions 

Register for one workshop or all three on Portal.

The literature review can be a challenging and time-consuming component of a research project. Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) can’t write your literature review for you, but this workshop will explore and introduce GenAI tools you may use as supports in the literature review process. We will identify ethical, legal, and intellectual property pitfalls associated with GenAI use, and offer guidelines and strategies for productive, ethical, and appropriate use of specific GenAI tools for specific purposes at each stage of the research and writing process. 

This interactive workshop is a collaboration between the Library and the Writing and Communication Centre and is designed for graduate students who are working on a literature review as part of a project proposal, thesis or dissertation, or a standalone journal article. 

This is an online workshop. Participants will join via MS Teams.

It's time to start planning your thesis or dissertation: now what?

You’re about to finish your course work or comprehensive exams and have started to think about writing your thesis or dissertation. Where do you begin?

Rock your Thesis is a three-part program that guides graduate students through the first phases of planning and writing a thesis or dissertation. The series covers topics such as planning and project management, structuring your thesis or dissertation, writing a literature review, using strategies for finding and recording research sources, and revision.

Each of the three Rock Your Thesis sessions balances talks from support staff across campus with hands-on activities to guide you through your own planning, drafting, and revising process.

Part 3: Revise and Submit - June 11, 2025

The third in the three-part “Rock Your Thesis” series, this workshop will equip you with the skills you need to revise your thesis or dissertation draft and plan to submit and defend it. This hands-on, interactive program has three objectives:

1. Review the submission and defence process and timelines

2. Introduce a range revision strategies and both the structural and sentence level 

3. Give participants an opportunity to try out revision and peer review activities with their own work

This workshop is best suited for Master’s and PhD students who have written at least part of their thesis or dissertation draft. Please bring a laptop, digital copy of your work-in-progress, and a printed copy of at least 10 pages of your thesis or dissertation.