Doctoral Seminars

Faculty of Communication Sciences, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI)

Academic & Professional Skills (3 ECTS; 2021 – 2025)

This seminar offers pre-professional training on topics of interest to Ph.D. students who will be pursuing academic or non-academic careers. Through experiential learning, guided workshops and goal-setting techniques, the seminar provides students (1) support in fulfilling dissertation requirements in a timely manner, (2) skills and tools for getting most out of their time as doctoral students, (3) guidance for building a competitive job market profile, and (4) resilience-building, stress management and self-leadership skills for mastering the doctoral program and their professional future. In addition, this seminar helps build cohort relationships and develops students’ abilities to collaborate with other scholars.

Quantitative Research Methods (3 ECTS; 2016 – 2021)

This seminar introduces students to the statistical analysis of social scientific data sets. The course provide students with the ability to demonstrate knowledge of the most common data-analytical objectives and techniques; critically consume empirical research findings presented in scholarly journals and popular culture reports; assess the appropriateness of various data-analytical techniques in response to questions asked by communication researchers; select appropriate data-analytical strategies based on certain variables of interest; and conduct a variety of statistical analyses on their own empirical data sets. Upon completion of this seminar, students will be able to produce a quantitative empirical communication study.