General Presentation
The group meets once a week in order to assess progress, fix/update its short and long-term goals, assign tasks to participants. Research work is done between these meetings, working either alone or in some subgroup. Between the weekly meetings, communication with the group is often necessary and use ad-hoc means from email to impromtu discussions.
The pedagogical objectives of these workshops is to develop some specific skills by practicing them in a resarch-oriented setting. These skills are (list not exhaustive):
- Assessing the state of the art on some question/problem: specifying the scope of the question, assessing what are the main questions and why they are important or difficult or .., round up the relevant litterature, organize the existing contributions historically.
- Formulating a problem formally: choosing definitions, stating hypotheses to be proven/disproven, identifying subproblems or special cases, finalize proven results by either expanding/generalizing them or proving impossibility of extensions, find connections with problems in other contexts.
- Presenting/explaining a research result to your colleagues: highlighting what is easy and what is tricky, what is original and what is standard. Also, explaining what remains unclear and why.
- Understanding why a research problem is important: Identifying the underlying stakes, the implicit motivations, the potential applications, the future perspectives.
- Understanding the rules of research as a profession/career: how to write a curriculum vitae, how to find a position, where to publish a research paper and how to write it, what is plagiarism really, where and how to get funding for one's research, etc.
Practical Information
Description: Students will be enrolled in either one long workshop spanning the whole semester, or two short workshops over the two halves of the semester. Joining a long workshop allows investigating a research topic in more depth. Joining two short workshops allows for more diversity in research topics, style of supervision, sets of colleagues with whom to collaborate.
Planning: Each workshop has a scheduled group meeting on Tuesday afternoons during the semester (half semester for short workshops). Other interactions outside this time slot can be organized on a call-by-need basis, as the superviser deems necessary.
Language: Workshops will be in English (unless everyone prefers French or another language).
Evaluation: Each workshop has its own guidelines/rules/.. for evaluation (see details below).