# PhD Research Skills — SEAR Lab Twenty-eight research skills, grouped into six competency milestones, delivered through the weekly research log in IE 6999. This repository is the **source of truth**; Canvas is a delivery copy, regenerated from here. **Students start at [`handbook/README.md`](handbook/README.md).** --- ## The shape of it Students keep a weekly research log split into three channels — **reading, writing, arithmetic** — graded every week. That already existed and works. This curriculum slots into it rather than sitting beside it. A **skill** is performed as one week's ordinary log entry. There is no extra weekly work: the skill replaces that week's entry, it does not stack on top of it. A **milestone** is a group of related skills. When they are all in, the student submits an index saying which week each went in. Graded complete / redo. One demonstration and the skill is held permanently — it does not repeat in a later semester. | | | | | |---|---|---|---| | **M1** | The Workbench | 5 | Spreadsheets · Notebooks+AI · Command line · LaTeX · Sanity checks | | **M2** | Reproducible Code | 4 | Git · Folder structure · Environments · CLI agents | | **M3** | Reading and Reasoning | 5 | Critique · Gap-finding · Logic · Claim/reason/evidence · Claim precision | | **M4** | The Manuscript | 5 | IMRAD · Citations · Authorship · Figures · Accessibility | | **M5** | The Review Cycle | 5 | Refereeing · Rebuttal · Venue · Talk · Defending | | **M6** | Stewardship | 4 | Zenodo · Data management · Proposals · Mentoring | Twenty-eight skills. Target two milestones per semester; the full set takes three to four semesters. Nothing is gated — no prerequisites, no completion requirements, no sequential progress. The tiers are advice about a sensible order, not locks, because the course runs every semester with a mixed cohort and any fixed schedule is wrong for most of the room. **Two ungraded companion pages**, narrowing from general to lab-specific. Both ship as Canvas pages with no assignment attached. - [`handbook/sear-lab-domain-knowledge.md`](handbook/sear-lab-domain-knowledge.md) — the lab. Infrastructure's three layers, the three research areas laid against them, and which course goes deep on each. **Read in week one**; surface level on purpose. - [`handbook/engineering-research-domain-knowledge.md`](handbook/engineering-research-domain-knowledge.md) — the questions behind the methods. Philosophy of science, the normative content of modelling choices, policy literacy, field history, economics. **Read later**, once the domain is familiar. **One optional bonus lesson**, shipped the same way: [`handbook/bonus-model-hierarchy.md`](handbook/bonus-model-hierarchy.md) — pencil, spreadsheet, simulation. It belongs to no milestone, so the count stays at twenty-eight. ## Layout ``` skills/ 28 lesson packages, one per skill milestones/ 6 milestone definitions and their gates handbook/ the public-facing entry point, plus the two ungraded pages exemplars/ passed student artifacts, with permission records/ Canvas exports (gitignored — may contain student names) scripts/ the Canvas generators docs/ design brief and background notes ``` ## Two skimmable HTML pages, both generated or hand-built in `handbook/` - [`curriculum.html`](https://sear-labs.github.io/teaching-phd-skills/handbook/curriculum.html) — **all 28 skills on one page**: purpose, deliverable and grading checklist for each. For a student choosing what to do this week without opening 28 files. **Generated** by `scripts/build_curriculum_page.py`; regenerate after editing any lesson, and never edit it by hand. - [`prospective-students.html`](handbook/prospective-students.html) — the recruiting page. A different job: it answers *should I join this lab*, not *what do I do this week*. ```bash python scripts/build_curriculum_page.py ``` ## Regenerating Canvas ```bash python scripts/push_to_canvas.py --course 277913 --dry-run python scripts/push_to_canvas.py --course 277913 ``` Idempotent — matches by title and updates in place, so re-running never duplicates. Everything is created **unpublished**; publishing is a decision made in Canvas. Requires `pandoc` on PATH and `CANVAS_TOKEN` in the environment. **The token is never written to this repository.** This repository is public. Edit the Markdown here and re-run. Do not edit a generated page in Canvas — the next run overwrites it. ## Two rules this repository follows **It points at the code standard and never restates it.** A skill file says "governed by Part 1" and links to . It does not summarise what Part 1 says. Part 0 of the standard forbids this, and the stated reason is measured rather than theoretical: a partial restatement reads as complete and stops the search. **Every deliverable is performed on the student's own dissertation work.** Not a sample repo, not a practice paper. PhD students correctly read toy exercises as busywork stacked on top of real work, and a restructured sample repo teaches nothing about the repo the thesis depends on. ## Contributing Senior students maintain this. The intended loop: you pass a milestone, your artifact goes into `exemplars/` with your permission, and the student after you starts from where you finished instead of from zero. Two things to check before opening a PR that adds an exemplar: - The student whose work it is has given written permission. - It contains no unpublished results and no data under a restriction. See [`skills/26-research-data-management.md`](skills/26-research-data-management.md) — that skill's whole subject is answering this question before rather than after. ## Licence The curriculum -- prose, skills, milestones, handbook and templates -- is **CC BY 4.0**: adopt and adapt it with attribution. The scripts are **MIT**. Stated by path in [LICENSE-DATA](LICENSE-DATA); [LICENSE](LICENSE) covers the scripts. Student work in `exemplars/` is excluded and stays the student's. ## Accessibility This is a public repository belonging to a Title II entity, so it is in scope for [`skills/19-accessibility.md`](skills/19-accessibility.md) — WCAG 2.1 AA from 26 April 2027. It is a legitimate target for a student taking that skill, and is the intended first one.