Journeys Workshop

Dates Offered: Mondays (AM)

One of the most common questions that students often ask is – how do I submit my IRB application? This workshop will review what the IRB is, and what your responsibilities are as an investigator. More importantly, it will review the specifics of how to successfully submit an IRB application. Students will get hands-on experience on preparing an IRB application, along with all of the supporting documents necessary. If you have never submitted an IRB application, or are currently working on an IRB application, this is the workshop for you. Members from the IRB staff will be there to facilitate and answer all of your questions.     

Requirements & Recommendations:

• Students should bring their laptops or iPad
• If you are currently working on an IRB application, bring your application with you to get your questions answered

Dates Offered: Tuesdays (PM)

In this workshop, students will explore good practices for organizing, collecting, managing datasets. In a typical collaborative study, anywhere from 50% to 80% of post data collection effort may be spent on organizing a dataset to make it suitable for analysis. Organizing (a.k.a cleaning) data is a tedious task that cannot always be automated. In order to minimize time, one should approach datasets organization as part of the experimental design. We will discuss steps that help prepare data in order to streamline the analysis and to obtain results thereof. 

Requirements:

Students should bring their laptops or iPad

Dates Offered: Thursdays (AM)

A common difficulty students encounter in clinical research is applying statistical concepts learned in class to their own data.  The goal of this workshop is to gain hands-on experience actually performing a clinical data analysis, in order to make you more comfortable working with your ISP data.  We will walk you step by step through an exploratory data analysis using an example dataset, at each stage briefly reviewing the theory and then practicing in JMP 14 Pro (available free from GU software webstore).  No experience with JMP required!   We will practice reporting summary statistics, testing for normality, selecting an appropriate statistical test and analyzing continuous and categorical variables. At the end of the workshop, you will independently analyze a sample data set and report your results.  Students who have already collected data for their ISP will have the opportunity to look at their own dataset.  This session is most beneficial for students who need help with the practical application of statistical concepts or who need a refresher.

Requirements & Recommendations:

• Required: Students will need to bring laptops or tablets; Download JMP 14 Pro from the GU software web store, and load the sample dataset in advance (we will provide this prior to the workshop, along with instructions)
• If available, bring your ISP data

Dates Offered: Thursdays (PM)

One of the most important research tools is the ability to perform an appropriate medical literature search to assist with development of your research question and hypothesis. Additionally, an appropriate literature search is essential to demonstrate how your data and results fit within the context of the medical literature. Whether you are just beginning your ISP or are already in the manuscript preparation process, this workshop is for you. This two-hour interactive workshop will build upon the foundational search skills acquired from previous library workshops in the Evidence-Based Medicine course. Using a sample research scenario, we will provide a quick refresher of the best practices for searching Ovid MEDLINE and apply these best practices to searching PubMed MEDLINE and Web of Science. Students are encouraged to bring their own research topic to apply search skills directly to their work. Students will also learn the benefit of harvesting search terms which will help to retrieve comprehensive search results from multiple databases and grey literature resources.

Requirements and Recommendations:

• Required: Students will need to bring laptops or tablets
• Recommended: Arrive with an existing RefWorks account
• Recommended: Bring a research topic/question and/or draft manuscript

Dates Offered: Fridays (AM)

An important part of participating in research is the ability to prepare and share your results in a poster format. The goal of this workshop is to provide an overview of the poster format, how to best organize and present your data, and how to provide a focused oral presentation. This workshop will be most helpful to students who have already completed or have nearly completed a research project or ISP. While not a requirement, students will be encouraged to bring their posters with them, so that they can practice their presentations, and get direct feedback on their poster and presentation from the faculty facilitators and colleagues. This will be a highly interactive session, and be most beneficial to students who come prepared with a poster for us to review and critique. Posters can be presented electronically. Students who participate in this workshop will become more confident in their presentation style.

Requirements and Recommendations:

• Required: Students should bring their laptops or iPad
• If you have previously prepared a poster for a national meeting for capstone, bring your poster in an electronic format to get feedback from the faculty.
• You will also be able to practice your presentation style in front of the faculty and student colleagues.