Student blogs

WE ARE BACK ON CAMPUS!!! After a whole academic year online, we finally can study on campus. The first course of the second year was Project Management, which is very important to learn if you are planning to conduct a research project. This course helped to improve my management skills.

Teachers

Our course leader was Claudia Hanson who mainly gave us lectures. But we also had some guest lectors as usual.

Course Themes

The goal of this course was to understand and apply project management principles in the field of research including observational and intervention studies. The topic covered in this course were:

• Human resource and leadership
  • The project cycle with its specific features
  • Matrixes and tools, such as Gantt charts, canvas, and other online tools, etc to facilitate project management
  • Stakeholder analysis and community engagement
  • Organizational structures and management functions
  • Characteristics of different leadership skills  for project management
  • Aspects of human resource management for research
  • Effective project teams / inter-professional working
• Ethics
  • Risk assessment and risks management
• Data management
  • Data and management flow
  • Specifics of research management such as writing a data management plan, GDPR, data repositories, etc
• Budgeting
  • Scoping, scheduling, and costing of projects

Course Schedule

This was a 2-week course. Most of the lectures were provided in the first week and we spent the whole second week to work on the assignment.

Assignments

For the assignment, we were asked to prepare a data collection protocol for a specific study. The study was assumed to be an interventional study with the purpose of reducing the under-5 mortaliy. The assignment included:

• Summary of the project
• Overall project structure
• Data collection strategy
• Data management plan
• Potential ethical issues
• A budget with a budget narrative

Additionally, the Gannt chart, budget table, and a data collection flowchart, and a figure of project structure were required. You can see my Gannt chart 😉

Group Work

There was not many group works in this course. The only group activity was to review a draf of the assignment each other. The review session was actually very helpful to get inspiration from charts and figures that were created by group members.

Exam

The individual assignment was the examination for the course and the assignment was graded “Fail” “Pass” or “Pass with distinction“.

Finally

I hope this review helped you to get to know about our program. Feel free to contact me if you have any kind of questions! Arigato 🙂

Sakura