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Workshops

While GCAC’s workshops are designed with graduate students in mind, all members of the University of Toronto community are welcome to attend as many workshops as they wish. We offer workshops in three formats: live online, in-person, and prerecorded (on-demand). Registration is required for all workshops. Live workshops are not recorded.

Please click the title of each workshop to reach the workshop description and registration link. Once you register, you will receive details on how to join each live or on-demand workshop you have chosen. If you are are not able to register online, please contact sgs.gcacreg@utoronto.ca to be registered manually.

GCAC’s weekly Listserv messages provide an easy way to keep track of what upcoming live workshops we are offering.

Click here to jump to On-Demand Workshops

Live Online Workshops (Summer 2026)

Registration for all workshops is required. Please click the title of each workshop for a description and registration link.
Workshops are online unless otherwise stated, with in-person workshops taking place on the St. George Campus.

Click here to register: https://folio.utoronto.ca/students/events/detail/6818098

This workshop, aimed at doctoral candidates facing a defense within the next year, will guide students through the process of preparing for your dissertation defense. We will cover disciplinary differences in the defense, questions to ask your supervisor and department administrators, the defense presentation, and preparing for the question period.

Presented by Dr. Jordana Lobo-Pires.

Click here to register: https://folio.utoronto.ca/students/events/detail/6818149

Like research papers and theses, thesis and grant proposals require graduate students to situate their work within the context of other research in their field(s). A well constructed literature review will help you to clarify key points for your reader such as why your work needs to be done, how it is original, and why your proposed method is appropriate. In this workshop we will examine characteristics of both short and long literature reviews, common mistakes students make when reviewing research in their field, and strategies for increasing the effectiveness of literature reviews. The material covered will be relevant to the literature-review segments of proposals, research papers, and theses.

Presented by Dr. Jane Freeman.

Click here to register: https://folio.utoronto.ca/students/events/detail/6818150

Do you get nervous before giving a speech? Want to feel more confident while presenting? Or want to make your conference presentations more interesting, rather than reading verbatim from slides?

In this workshop, Dr. Jay Olson will cover the communication skills necessary to give an effective conference presentation. Topics include handling nervousness, enhancing clarity, improving body language, holding the audience’s attention. We will also cover differences in in-person versus online presentations. These tools will help presenters engage and persuade their academic audiences.

By the end of the workshop, you will:

  • Know how to avoid common mistakes when presenting.
  • Know practical methods to deal with nervousness.
  • Know how to engage audiences from the beginning of your speech

Presented by Dr. Jay Olson.

Click here to register: https://folio.utoronto.ca/students/events/detail/6818151

This workshop will help students formulate focused, analytical, and appropriate research questions for their project.

Presented by Dr. Jordana Lobo-Pires.

Click here to register: https://folio.utoronto.ca/students/events/detail/6818152

Graduate students write many proposals − federal grant proposals, travel grant proposals, thesis proposals − and every proposal has a potentially significant impact on a student’s ability to carry out specific research. The introductory workshop in this series provides an overview of proposal writing designed to get students thinking about the demands of, and the predictable variations in, this important genre of writing. We will examine the similarities and differences between thesis and grant proposals, consider the main questions that most proposals must answer, and see examples of answers to those questions in successful proposals. We will also consider common pitfalls in proposal writing, and strategies for getting started on writing a proposal.

Presented by Dr. Jane Freeman.

Click here to register: https://folio.utoronto.ca/students/events/detail/6818153

Where do you find little-known (and low-competition) scholarships? How do you approach companies to fund your research? This workshop will focus on alternative funding sources for graduate students.

Topics will include: traditional funding categories (federal, provincial, and internal), how to choose which scholarships to apply for (e.g., stacking, quotas, estimating expected value), common pitfalls (e.g., internal/external deadlines, departmental nomination, where not to look for scholarships), and overcoming common excuses (low GPA, no publications, not enough time). Attendees will also receive a guide which outlines the steps involved in finding, applying for, and receiving alternative sources of funding.

Presented by Dr. Jay Olson.

Click here to register: https://folio.utoronto.ca/students/events/detail/6818154

Moving from academia into a professional role means rethinking how you present your skills and experience to potential employers. This workshop will uncover how communication styles shift between academic and non-academic worlds. We will then focus on interview communications, examine how the style in a non-academic interview differs from that of a job talk for an academic position, and develop strategies for non-academic interviews, including how to adapt your tone, structure your responses, and frame your academic background to resonate outside university settings.

Presented by Zhen Wang.

Click here to register: https://folio.utoronto.ca/students/events/detail/6818155

As use of Generative AI in academic writing becomes more widespread, it is clear that some students are able to use it to increase engagement with their own ideas while others’ use leaves them with a sense of “psychological dissociation from [their] written output.” (Kosmyna, 2025). In this workshop, we will consider a spectrum of student agency in the use of GenAI, with “puppets” at one end and “puppeteers” at the other. We will examine both the sorts of uses of chatbots that result in what’s being referred to as “cognitive debt” (quick task completion without the mental encoding that allows students to remember details later) and the sorts of uses that can help students use GenAI as a means of “distributed cognition” that can facilitate deeper thinking.

Presented by Dr. Jane Freeman.

Click here to register: https://folio.utoronto.ca/students/events/detail/6818156

Presenting outside academia means more than just simplifying your slides. It requires rethinking how you connect with your audience. In this workshop, we’ll discuss how institutional frameworks influence communication norms, and how to adapt your presentation for industry, government, non-profits, and other professional audiences. We’ll discuss how communication strategies for non-academic audiences differ from those used in academic conference talks and classrooms, and how to engage listeners through tailored messaging, compelling visuals, and effective delivery techniques.

Presented by Zhen Wang.

Click here to register: https://folio.utoronto.ca/students/events/detail/6818157

Writing concisely makes your ideas shine. But revising for brevity requires a sound knowledge of which elements weigh down writing and how to address them. This workshop introduces students to this fundamental knowledge: we will explore how to identify “collapsible” elements in your scholarly writing (e.g., wordy expressions) and how to tackle these elements in ways that strengthen concision without sacrificing content. We will primarily explore these foci by working with samples of scholarly writing, but you are welcome to bring your own piece of academic writing to work with.

Presented by Dr. Danielle Martak.

Click here to register: https://folio.utoronto.ca/students/events/detail/6818158

This workshop has two parts. We’ll start by talking about Aristotle’s topics of invention (explicit critical thinking strategies that help in making diagramming more effective) and then connect those to a sequence of three diagramming techniques to use when clarifying your thinking. These techniques are designed to help you gain greater conceptual clarity as you decide what to include and exclude in your documents, and the various options for structuring your arguments.

Presented by Dr. Jane Freeman.

Click here to register: https://folio.utoronto.ca/students/events/detail/6818159

Note-taking is a critical yet under-discussed aspect of qualitative research. Well-written and properly organized notes can help a researcher remember minor details within their research, help train their attention to important themes and questions during the research process, and make the subsequent process of writing one’s dissertation smoother.

This workshop will address ways of structuring field notes while offering practical tips for note taking. We will discuss different note taking strategies, how to expand one’s attention to the details of research, how note writing itself can help develop research concerns, and some of the ethical considerations around writing field notes.

Presented by Bradley Dunseith.

Click here to register: https://folio.utoronto.ca/students/events/detail/6818160

Interviews are the foundation of a lot of qualitative research methodology. This workshop will discuss strategies on how to conduct interviews for one’s own research, consider when to use structured, semi-structured, and un-structured interviews, and reflect on ethical considerations that go beyond getting approval from the Research Ethics Board.

Specifically, we will be focusing on how to draft the actual questions a researcher asks a research participant. What kinds of interview questions prompt dialogue and reflection? How best to avoid questions that elicit one-word answers? This workshop will explore ways of writing interview questions which reflect one’s research questions – and that produce meaningful interviews for everyone involved.

Please note: This workshop is not about preparing students to give interviews as job applicants. It is a workshop about conducting interviews as the researcher (interviewer) and not about being interviewed.

Presented by Bradley Dunseith.

On-Demand Workshops

Please click the title of workshop series, then click the title of each workshop for a description and registration link. Workshop runtime is listed after the presenter’s name.

For students in Divisions 2, 3, and 4

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