Getting Started Development Day: Part 1

Who is it for? Research Students between Enrolment and Registration

What will it cover? This Development Day has been designed for research students who are in the early stages of their research degree and will cover Systematic Literature Searching, Risk Assessing your Research & MS Word: Working with Long Documents.

All Development Days include lunch and refreshments and the opportunity for students to meet and chat with students from other disciplines. Just book the sessions you would like to attend.

Schedule

09:15 Arrival and Registration: Refreshments available
09:30 Systematic Literature Searching: Gillian Siddall and Miggie Pickton
11:30 Refreshments
11:45 Risk Assessing your Research: Safety, Health & Environment team at UN
13:15 Lunch
14:00 Microsoft Word: Working with Long Documents: Simone Apel
15:00 Refreshments
15:10 Word: Working with Long Documents continues.
16:00 Close

Content

Systematic literature searching
Gillian Siddall and Miggie Pickton.

Being able to demonstrate a thorough approach to literature searching is a key requirement for a researcher. Borrowing ideas and methods from information and health sciences, this workshop will highlight some of the different strategies for searching the literature. Attendees will design their own search strategy and, in the practical element of the session, will explore various resources and the tools to make the most of them.

By the end of this session attendees will have the knowledge and skills to:

• Explore key resources using appropriate key words and other search tools.
• Plan, implement and record a search strategy appropriate to their own research.
• Evaluate and select appropriate references from search results.

Risk Assessing your Research
Safety, Health & Environment team at UN

This workshop aims to explain the main requirements of current health and safety legislation with regards to the risk assessment process, how this translates into University policies and for students to be able to apply this in a very practical way to their research. All students are required to risk assess their research for the registration process.

The objectives of the workshop:

• To develop knowledge and understanding of current health and safety legislation requirements for risk assessment;
• To develop knowledge and understanding of how this is reflected in University Occupational Health and safety policies;
• To develop knowledge and understanding of the differences between risk and hazard;
• To understand the meaning of ‘competence’ in terms of risk assessments and when to obtain ‘expert’ input;
• To understand the various stages involved in the risk assessment process;
• To develop confidence in conducting risk assessments.
• To be able to apply your knowledge and understanding in a practical way to your research.

Word: Working with long documents
Park Library IT Room: Simone Apel

This hands-on workshop focuses on Microsoft Word and looks at the challenges of handling your thesis using Word. The workshop offers practical tips to address various issues, such as templates, styles, headers and footers, master documents and much more. We start by looking at the physical formatting rules to which you should adhere for your thesis, then move onto a practical session in which we cover the essentials of working with long documents.

After the workshop you will:-

• Know the formatting rules to which you have to adhere for your thesis
• Be able to use features in Word such as templates and styles
• Be able to create master documents
• Understand essential safeguards to prevent loss of data
• Learn about further resources to help you as you progress

This workshop is recommended particularly for those students who have not yet started to produce their thesis and are unfamiliar with Word styles and templates.

This Development Day is open to any student currently registered on a research degree programme at the University of Northampton. Further information is available from Simone Apel (simone.apel@northampton.ac.uk; 01604 893418).