QNL backs post-graduates with peer support network
THE Qatar National Library’s (QNL) informal Postgraduate Peer Support Network offers current and aspiring postgraduates, mostly PhD students in need of intellectual and emotional support, a relaxed environment to meet and support one another.
The group meets once a month at the library to exchange ideas and share research, thoughts, tips, experiences and personal milestones and achievements.
Sayeed Mohammed, Information Services Librarian at the library and a PhD student at the Queensland University of Technology, who runs the network sessions while managing his own doctoral studies, explained the motivation for establishing the network: “There are many PhD students who are struggling alone. They’re either enrolling in online courses, or are registered with universities in some other part of the world. They are all managing different struggles - access to information, access to people, struck with their research methods and lack of specific set of skills required to complete their PhD tasks. And they have nobody to ask or cannot travel very often to their universities to get help from their supervisors.”
Creating a network is one way of “bringing together stranded and desolated PhD students to encourage and motivate one another and also to give emotional support to each other,” Sayeed added.
The monthly sessions of the network are practical, focussing on research methodology such as how to build an argument in a thesis, what makes an effective argument, and how you corroborate your argument with evidence and statistics. There have also been sessions on writing a PhD research proposal, critical reading techniques, survey analysis and software skills this year.
In the meantime, students in the network are benefitting from having this forum to share knowledge, information and expertise.
The network recently organised, “Researcher’s Dialogue”, a focus group and workshop where researchers shared their stories, including the challenges they face and how to solve them.