Get a head start on your upper-year! Join us for a multi-day online programme that will help you prepare for upper-year courses and assignments and for graduate or professional school applications.
Creating Knowledge is a series of workshops that will be held online via Zoom from October 28th to 31st, 2024. This conference focuses on these essential skills for upper year students:
- Critically evaluating research and communicating findings in literature reviews
- Conducting effective literature searches for the life sciences and humanities
- Identifying and communicating your relevant abilities in applications
- Managing longer and more complex writing and research projects
- Deepening your analytic and critical voice in writing
If you have any questions, please contact Newcollege.library@utoronto.ca(Note, clicking on this link will open a pre-formatted email).
Who can participate?
New College students or students enrolled in New College Programs (African Studies; Buddhism, Psychology, and Mental Health; Caribbean Studies; Critical Studies in Equity and Solidarity; Human Biology; Women and Gender Studies) in third, fourth year and above.
Students in first or second year are not eligible to attend, but we encourage you to sign up in your upper years!
Schedule
We are so excited to offer a variety of sessions for students in across disciplines. Check out our schedule below for an overview of the entire week of workshops! Be sure to check out the session descriptions for the link to register for each workshop.
Session Descriptions and Registration Links
Review the session descriptions below and register for the individual workshops that you want to attend! Each workshop has a unique registration link and you will receive a confirmation email for each workshop with the Zoom details.
Please note: You will need to be signed in with your UofT Zoom account to register! Be sure to use the Sign In with SSO option and utoronto as the domain. Detailed instructions on how to sign into the UofT Zoom account are available on the CTSI Zoom website.
Anyone who is unable to attend is encouraged to contact us to let us know they are not able to attend.
Exploring Marginalized Voices and Critical Research Practices
Facilitators: Mikayla Redden and Aneta Kwak
Description: Critical scholars need to consider which voices and perspectives are bring brought into the scholarly conversation and who’s voice is missing from the conversation. Have you thought about who’s voices and perspectives are included in your bibliography or the bibliography of the works you are reading? Join us for a session to critically evaluate the scholarly conversation and exploring ways to find non-dominant voices and perspectives.
Session Registration
Zotero: A Better Way to Manage your Citations
Facilitator: Aneta Kwak
Description: Tired of spending hours organizing resources and creating your in-text citations and reference list? Introducing Zotero, a time saving citation management tool that allows you to collect, organize, annotate, and extract your resources as a citation or bibliography. This session will teach you how to use Zotero to manage your resources and how Zotero can be used to collaborate with your colleagues.
Session Registration
Sustaining a long-term writing and research process: How to manage larger projects
Facilitator: Susan Hopkirk
In your upper year classes, you will encounter longer research papers and may even be taking on a year-long research project. These new, more complex forms of writing don’t have to be daunting! In this session, we will explore the approaches that successful writers in all disciplines use to organize their research projects, keep their momentum going, and keep large projects manageable. We will also discuss some of the psychological and motivational aspects of tackling larger, more complex written works.
Session Registration
Advanced Techniques for Literature Searching in the Life Sciences
Facilitator: Aneta Kwak
Description: This advanced research session will explore the OVID Medline database and demonstrate features that will help you with identifying relevant papers for grant proposals, scoping and systematic literature reviews.
Please note, this is an advanced research workshop. Attendees will be expected to already be familiar with Boolean operators, truncation, parentheses, and phrase searching.
Session Registration
Writing Scientific Literature Reviews: Effectively telling your research story
Facilitator: J. Coplen Rose
Unsure of what makes a good literature review or of how to organize one? In this workshop, we will explore key strategies for telling your overall research story, building argument into your review, managing a large quantity of sources, organizing your article critiques into a coherent narrative, and generally for tackling these larger writing projects.
Session Registration
How to effectively read and critique primary articles in Science
Facilitated by: Megan Stewart
Learn how to more easily read and effectively critique science articles. We will examine the key features of each section of a primary research paper and review concepts such as significance, effect size, replication and meta-analysis, discussing their implications for your critique.
Session Registration
Preparing Graduate and Professional School Applications: A panel discussion
Panelists:
- Dr. Alissa Trotz (Director, Women and Gender Studies Institute)
- Dr. Colleen Dockstader (Associate Professor, Human Biology)
- Dr. Susan Hopkirik (Writing Centre Instructor, New College Writing Centre).
This session will provide insights into the overall graduate school application process. Meet with a panel of professors from the social sciences, sciences, and writing studies, and with a career educator to hear advice on asking for reference letters, finding a supervisor, choosing a program, and writing your personal statement. We will review a list of resources to help you throughout the year as you prepare your application.
Session Registration