Seminars and Workshops

The RISE Office of Career Development offers relevant, useful workshops for career scientists. The information below will give you a review of these workshops; your comments and suggestions for additional offerings are welcome.

Grant Writing Workshop—Developing a Competitive Fellowship Application
Attendees are introduced to required application components, shown strategies for preparing a successful application, and given an overview of the NIH grant review process. A panel of students who have submitted successful fellowship applications discuss how-to's and attendees are given the opportunity for a review of their applications by faculty who have served as reviewers for NIH F31 applications.

Designing a Winning Poster
This workshop is essential for students interested in learning and/or improving poster design and layout. In addition, students hone their skills for delivering short talks and discussing effective presentation strategies.

Manuscript Preparation Workshop
During this workshop, students explore a range of topics, including the proper structure of a manuscript, tips for developing a writing timeline, preparing figures and figure legends, choosing an appropriate journal, and responding to reviewers' critiques.

Public Speaking—Toastmasters
Toastmasters International is a non-profit organization that enables members to practice their public speaking and leadership skills in regularly scheduled meetings. Meharry's on-campus group was chartered October of 2010.

Dissertation Boot Camp
Dissertation Boot Camp is an intensive workshop for Ph.D. candidates currently writing their dissertations or who are stalled in their writing process. During the workshop, brief discussions on topics such as goal setting, time management, and the writing habits of successful and prolific academic writers are addressed. However, the main focus of the workshop is to assist students with completion of their dissertations by helping them develop the discipline to adhere to an established writing schedule.

Other writing workshops held in the last workshop cycle...

• "Getting What You Came For"
• "Scientific Writing for Dissertation and Journal Publications"
• "How to Write a Biomedical Research Paper"

Contact the RISE office for information about any of these workshops or to be added to the newsletter email distribution list for ongoing notices: lwoods@mmc.edu.