Corinna Oster

The online course PhD Success Lab took place as a 12-week online course with one course module every week for self-studying and live sessions where we talked about the modules and all our PhD project struggles.

Every Monday there was a module with video instructions from Bärbel Tress and exercise sheets for self-studying. We started with topics about “how to plan and control our PhD project”, followed by “developing ourselves and organising our time”, “Dissertation writing” and “optimising supervision”. So, we learned about the soft skills that are needed to handle our first big scientific project.

For me as a PhD student in the second year it was one of the most helpful soft skill courses I have ever done. It was helpful to break down the whole project to get an overview what must be done during the remaining time. Furthermore, the video instructions from Bärbel were very motivating every week and a good thing is that we have access to these instructions also after the course. So, we can work on it whenever we need it again. I found the live sessions most inspiring; it was good to hear that also other PhD students struggle sometimes and that we could found suggestions and solutions together. During the weekly moduels, we got informative and well-structured exercise sheets with questions about reflecting ourselves and the work on our PhD project. It helped me so much that it was always emphasised how important it is to have breaks and doing something fun for oneself and that the basic element is to structure the workload on a daily and weekly basis. In my opinion the “PhD success lab” course is extremely useful, interesting, and motivating for young scientists that are wondering how to structure their projects and that are doubting about finishing on time. I am incredibly grateful to Bärbel and the other participants for their patience and time to answer all this questions and coming up with great solutions and advices. Moreover, I want to thank GLOMAR for founding my participation on the “PhD success lab” course.