Podcast: New Resources For Students Writing Theses and Dissertations
Are you struggling with time management and keeping up with your writing schedule? In this episode of the Highlights Podcast, Alyssa Stalsberg Canelli discusses tools to help students increase research and writing productivity and improve work-life balance. These resources will be particularly helpful for students writing dissertations and theses.
Transcript
Simon:
Hello and welcome to the second episode of the Highlights Podcast. I am Simon Goodacre, and today I'll be speaking with Alyssa Canelli, the Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs. Thanks for making time for this Alyssa. We are going to be talking about the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity, but since you're still relatively new to our office, I thought we might want to take a second just to let you introduce yourself a little bit to our community.
Alyssa:
Well, thank you for having me, Simon. I am not new to the Brandeis community. I've been at Brandeis for four years now. In my prior role, I was working with the office of Experiential Learning and Teaching, and my passion and my development has really been around the teaching and training process for graduate students and faculty. My PhD is in English. I went to Emory University for my PhD, and then I came to Brandeis, and then, last year, I took on this role of Assistant Dean in Academic Affairs, which is a ... it's a much more holistic view in terms of the professional development and academic development of our graduate students. So we're really working in partnership with the office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences to think about graduate students in terms of all aspects of their career, whether it's academic, professional and student support.
Simon:
Okay. Well let's talk about the National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity or the NCFDD. I understand that we've joined as an institutional member for the first time this year. Could you tell us a little bit about the organization?
Alyssa:
Sure. So the organization is a fantastic opportunity for Brandeis. It really is at its core, it's a community full of faculty members, post docs and graduate students who are navigating through career transitions. But the wonderful thing about NCFDD is that it has specific things for graduate studies and post docs. And when I'm talking about graduate students, we're talking about issues around time management, setting priorities, writing challenges, dissertation coaching, those major thresholds where our advanced graduate students kind of are struggling, I think a lot in terms of making progress, but also finding the really good resources and support to support their progress.
Simon:
So tell me a little bit more about the resources that this organization has for grad students.
Alyssa:
So, it's an entirely online community. There are monthly webinars that you have access to through the membership. So you can sign up for webinars, but you can also access the archives of them. Every semester they offer a 14-day writing challenge, so if you're at a point and you're either writing an article or trying to make progress on your dissertation or thesis, you can be with a community of other people across the nation who are really working on a 14-day writing challenge. There's a dissertation success curriculum, which is a combination of webinars, individual coaching, very specific communities around the dissertation process, and it's very detailed in terms of the emotional support around the writing process, which can be very painful at different points, but also very specific ways of thinking about your organization. Thinking about planning your process, thinking about the dissertation as a genre and what parts of the dissertation to fulfill, what functions and really helping you understand that process.
Simon:
Do you see this being a resource that's particularly helpful for PhD students who are in smaller departments perhaps who don't have many peers at Brandeis who are at the same stage of the dissertation writing?
Alyssa:
Absolutely. I think particularly for people who are in the social sciences and humanities and lesser of the sciences, because often there's more of a collaborative ethos anyway in terms of research and writing processes. But I think when you get into that advanced stage of writing, it becomes so isolating. And the research shows this as well, that if you can create a community of fellow writers, you can provide the emotional support and the accountability around actually producing those pages and actually producing a shitty first draft—to quote Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird—that it's really about the community and particularly for small programs in which students may not have a strong cohort of other people going through program at the same time that it really it's a community—it's a virtual community that they can access and get that support.
Simon:
I see. And so, if I were getting started with this as a student, I would login and we'll talk about how to do that in a moment, but I would login, and then how would I find someone who's writing something similar to what I'm writing or at least as in the same discipline as me?
Alyssa:
So, you have to go ahead and join and activate your membership and then once your membership is activated through your Brandeis login, you have access to everything. And so the way you kind of get deeper is to sign up for the writing challenge or the dissertation curriculum and then that will unlock the different communities and forums and things like that. But once you login, you have access to everything. I spent hours honestly on there just listening to a couple of webinars, picking and choosing things, getting a sense of what's out there. And they are phenomenal, work life balance, professional development offerings from experts in all sorts of fields.
Simon:
So, how do students login to the system?
Alyssa:
So you'll go to our website, www.facultydiversity.org/join and that link is available in the recent Highlights email, will also be available on the GSAS website and through a variety of different communications. You can also Google NCFDD as well and that will come up. It's a top hit on Google; I've tried it. And that will also come up, and you can hit the login button and your Brandeis unet will be the way that you login to verify the Brandeis institutional membership. And from there it really becomes a customizable experience depending on where you're at in your program, what issues interests you, what do you need support on. You can really start to craft professional development support through this resource to fit where you're at. And of course I'm always available to talk and to get some coffee and to chat about the offerings or provide some support around accessing what you need to access or having some thoughts about professional development.
And I also want to make it clear that this is part of a renewed commitment on the part of the graduate school to supporting the professional development of all of our graduate students, no matter what stage they're at and what career track they're pursuing. Stay tuned, we're actually going to be launching a digital pedagogy certificate option that we'll be launching in the spring of 2019. The application will open in October, and again, that will be announced in highlights, but it's a way for students to get a certificate that they have been through a digital pedagogy training in terms of using online tools and resources in both their teaching and their research. So stay tuned for that announcement as well.
Simon:
Well, thank you very much, Alyssa, for your time today, and, listeners, I hope you'll join us next time on the Highlights podcast.