Professional, Academic and Personal Development

All Doctoral students/Clinical Research Training Fellows (CRTFs) are also required to complete a number of Graduate School Professional Development courses as part of doctoral Degree registration. The Graduate School's Professional Development attendance requirement exists in order to ensure that all students receive some professional development training while at Imperial and have the opportunity to engage with the programme, alongside their research work.  Clinical PhD fellows can fulfil the minimum attendance requirement via a number of options, however one component that is common to all options is completion of the online plagiarism awareness course by the time of the Early Stage Assessment (ESA).

Clinical PhD Fellows/CRTFs/MD(Res) students should take courses from the Doctoral course list which includes:

• Research communication
• Research impact & societal engagement
• Professional progression
• Industry and enterprise

There are a number of useful documents and services provided by the Graduate School to support PhD fellows and supervisors during their studies. These include:

• Doctoral student coaching programme   this provide an opportunity to talk, independently from your academic department, about challenges you may be experiencing as you study for your doctorate. The programme primarily focuses on building effective working relationships and there may be other self-development issues that you wish to explore.
• Research degree Mediation – whilst the majority of research degree student supervisor partnerships work extremely well, there may be occasions where PhD students and/or their supervisors are unhappy with their partnership.  This can be for a variety of reasons, but quite often, it is mis-communication and/or misinterpretation of intention between the student and supervisor which leads to partnership breakdown. 
• Research success guide - the success guide offers advice and resources for clinical PhD fellows to excel at Imperial College London.
• Code of practice for research students and supervisors  expectations and responsibilities for both are laid out in this short document.

Fast Track Impact – training for researchers by researchers
https://www.fasttrackimpact.com

Thinkwell - psychological and educational research to assist maximum productivity
https://www.ithinkwell.com.au

ThinkWrite - writing courses and information
https://www.thinkwrite.biz

Vitae – Researcher Professional Development
https://www.vitae.ac.uk/vitae-publications/guides-briefings-and-information/vitae-researcher-booklets
https://www.vitae.ac.uk/vitae-publications/rdf-related/researcher-development-framework-rdf-vitae.pdf

Internal

Academic regulations
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/about/governance/academic-governance/regulations/