Developing good IT skills is an almost essential part of a postgraduate programme, however, and you will be expected to use IT as a key study skill – at the very least you will have to use the internet, send and receive e-mail, and write your assignments using a computer. There are a number of ways in which you can make the best use of IT, though, whatever your current level of skills:
• If you have never used computers, then it will be helpful if you take a basic computer skills course before you come to the UK. This should cover basic skills such as word processing, file management, the use of e-mail, and accessing and searching the internet. Courses such as this are available from IT training companies in most towns and cities around the world.
• Go to the IT services induction session in your first week or so at your university. Every university offers these sessions for new students, to show you how the university system works, what services are provided, where public access workstations are located, and what software is available. This may be provided by and for your own department, or may be provided centrally by the university.
• Study carefully what it says in your programme handbook about using IT, so that you know what will be expected of you.
• Identify what special training in IT is available in the department or university. This may range from highly specialised technical programmes to basic introductions to software and hardware. Talk to your tutor about your own needs and which courses will be most useful for you.
• If possible, have your own desktop or laptop computer. As a Masters student it is unlikely that you will be provided with your own computer, although as a Doctoral student you may be. In either case, having your own may be a better idea. This is, of course, an expensive thing to do and may not be possible.
An important part of your postgraduate studies will be the library or learning resources service within the university. This is because more of your work will be individual work focused on topics of your own choice rather than simply following the themes and topics that everybody else on the course is doing. You will need, therefore, to develop good skills of searching for literature, research and resources to find the specialist research and materials on your chosen topic.
This is particularly true in relation to your dissertation or project or, if you are a Doctoral student, your thesis. You will need to be able to identify resources and literature that are available not only in your own university but also at other UK universities and in libraries and databases around the world, and then know how to obtain relevant and useful material. For example, you will have to be able to identify not just relevant books and papers in international journals, you will also have to find Doctoral and Masters dissertations on your topic from universities anywhere in the world. So there are a number of skills you will need:
• You will need to learn how to use your own university library. This will include knowing where the catalogues are, where the books and journals in your field are kept and how to order resources from other libraries through, for example, the system of inter-library loan.
• You will need to learn about the main bibliographic sources in your field – published bibliographies, on-line databases and search engines or catalogues. This will enable you to identify and access materials outside your own university.
• You will need to learn how to undertake internet searches for resources and materials in your field.
More can be found in Chapter 8 of the book Postgraduate Study in the UK by Nicholas and Rosalind Foskett.
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