Hello, everybody. Welcome to today's webinar by SOAS, University of London. Today we'll be looking at the application process specifically for prospective undergraduate students. My name's Dan. I work in the UK student recruitment team at SOAS, and I'm joined today by two of my colleagues, Laura and Lisa. They'll be in the background answering any of your questions that you submit in the question box. And then Laura will also join me to answer any Q&A live at the end as well. So as we do go through today's session, please do feel free to pop any questions that you've got into the Q&A in the question box. And they can be addressed as we go on. And as I say, there'll be a little bit of time spare as well at the end for those. I thought it might be a good idea just to begin by showing you some of the key subject areas of focus at SOAS. As a university, we're internationally recognised for our expertise in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. These different regions of the world, often termed together as the global south, are where lots of our different courses draw inspiration and focus from in their teaching and research as well. So you'll see some courses on here which are regionally focused. So you might see countries or areas of the world listed. There might be regional studies and language studies, which is quite common for these subjects. But then you'll also see other different discipline subject listed as well. Things such as economics, history, law. And then again, these subjects are all teaching you about the discipline, learning that subject. But again, lots of the content and the materials and the content that you'll be covering in your lessons will be derived from the global south. So it's a fairly unique perspective and something that I think is incredibly valuable and exciting that SOAS offers, which does make us stand out a little bit from some of the other universities that are out there. But if you are attending this webinar today, I'd imagine that you might be slightly familiar with us already. You've done a bit of research perhaps. But if you are still in that research phase and you're looking to decide which subject you want to study, I'd really recommend having a look at our websites. You can find each of the subject areas on the website. And then within those subject areas, the specific degrees that are available as well. There are a whole variety of different degrees. And with all of our single and joint honours programs combined, I think there's over at 250 different options for you at undergraduate level. So that really is fantastic. There's a lot of choice there. So it's worth spending a bit of time doing some research even before you start thinking about making your application, just to find out what you think would be best for you. You may also find that you want to have some preparation before going straight into a full undergraduate degree. We do offer two foundation years, which are out there as well. The first of which is business management, law and economics. And the second is social sciences, arts, humanities foundation. Both of those courses are geared up to ensure that students who complete those programs are guaranteed progression onto any of our undergraduate courses as well. So if you do find that maybe you need a bit more support there, perhaps in terms of grades and entry requirements. And we'll talk more about entry requirements later on. But it might be worth thinking about one of those foundation programs as well. So recognize that there's likely students who are currently completing their applications at the moment for 2022 entry for this year in autumn. But then we may also be joined by some students who are applying for 2023. So for next year, the majority of the dates that are used today are talking about this year. However, there are a couple of the ones which have been made available by UCAS already for 23 entries. So they may also be listed on some of the slides and I'll try to highlight them where they're available. But when it comes to dates, most of them will be in reference to this year. However, often they're roughly similar year on year. So to get started, I think it's important to look at how you first actually begin with your application. When you apply to university, you make one application which is sent to all of the different universities that you choose to apply to. So this is a centralized application and it goes through a platform called UCAS which you may or may not already be familiar with depending on where you're at in your journey. So you go to the UCAS website and register, confirm the year that you're looking to start and select that you're interested in undergraduate study. You may see some other options on there, but undergraduate study is the sort of regular degree that you'll be looking to go into. This will then take you through to the UCAS hub and you can think of that as a dashboard or as a sort of one stop shop with all of the key information that you need for your undergraduate application. So that will look a little bit like this in terms of some of the buttons that you might see. You'll go through and find the section where it says your applications and this is where you'll start the actual application itself. When you begin this application, you will be asked whether you're applying from a school, college or centre. If you are applying from one of these, it's important to clarify yes as you'll then be given the opportunity to add a buzzword. This is something that would have been provided to you by your school, college or centre that you're applying from. The reason that you'll use this is it links your application to that institution. So this means that then someone from that institution, often a nominated UCAS advisor, maybe your personal tutor, will then have access to your application and they can do stuff like submit a reference. And this can also be really important for your own internal school deadlines if you have any of those. If you don't know that buzzword at the moment, you can add this at a later date, but just remember to do so as it is quite important there for tracking your application. UCAS have worked on simplifying the application process over the last couple of years. So there are now four main sections which you need to be focusing on. The first is your choices, then you have your profile, your personal statements and the reference. And that reference is what I was just talking about there, that your teacher or someone from your institution is able to submit. So this is what the one of the first sections looks like and this is your profile. This is all of the general information about you and this builds up an understanding for universities as to who you are. It's really important to complete all of the details in your application. Universities will then be able to use this to make sure that they are addressing you correctly and contacting you in the right manner. They'll be able to use this information to make you an appropriate offer as well. And in many instances, this will begin the basis of your student record for when you start at a university as well. Fortunately, you can actually save this at any point, so you don't have to complete all of this in one go. You can take your time and I would recommend that you do so. If you need to ask for any support from parents or supporters in making sure that you have this information accurately recorded, then you can do that and you can come back to it at a later date. Some of the pieces of information which you will submit are what we might describe as protected information. So this is stuff that relates to diversity, inclusion, for example. This will only be provided to universities once you have a place or your application has been archived. So what that means in short is that universities cannot take that information into account when they're making a decision or the offer making stage. So that information is protected and only released to them later on in the process. There are a variety of different pieces of information which you might need to submit and these will vary depending on your status, particularly whether you're a home student or an overseas students as well. You may be asked about your residency status. So where possible, if you do need to seek any advice about that, there's some information on our website. So you can know what you need to put in there. You can also include information about your education so far. This is looking at all of the qualifications that you've taken since roughly GCSE or equivalent. You can also fill out the section about employment, so covering any paid jobs that you've had. Note this is just paid jobs and you don't need to include voluntary work in this section. And after you filled in all of this information and you're happy that you have it ready, you can then move on to this section here. So this is about your choices. Hopefully before you reach this, you'll have spent some time researching universities having a look through their websites. As I was mentioning earlier is a really good idea to do looking at the subjects that are available, thinking about what you might want to study and what really appeals to you. If you've done this and you've got a list of subjects ready, you can then add your choices into this part of your UCAS application. You use the big blue button there that says add choice. And this will bring up a form which you can see on the left hand side and that's a auto-populating list. So as you start typing in, it will bring up all of the relevant options for you. And you can select the courses you're interested in studying and at which universities you would like to study. You can submit up to five choices. You don't have to submit all five though. You can only choose one if you would like. This could be at five different universities or you could make five choices for one university. So it really is up to you how you make those choices there. With something that you might want to bear in mind and this is particularly important for a university such as ours where we have lots of different joint honours courses available. An example I've got on the screen is for history and global development.  It's not the majority of what you'll be studying. It's 50-50 in terms of the title of the degree. Once you then start at university, you'll then be the option through the modules that you select in your first, second and final years to customise the weighting towards each of those subjects. But you don't need to worry about which way around that degree title is written. If you are applying for a joint honours, just so long as both of the subjects are in the name of the course that you're submitting there. Then you move on to those final two blocks, the personal statement. I'll go into some further information about this on the next slides. Then also your reference as well. The references, what I've already mentioned, for those of you applying from school, centres or institutions, this is often from a teacher or an academic and they are able to use this opportunity to give some more information about you. They're trained in how to write one of these references and then they know what universities are looking for as well. For some students, some applicants, you might have been out of education for a period of time. So if you've been out of education for over three years, then we can accept a professional reference similar to applying for a job. So moving on to personal statements. This is a really big part of your application. There's lots of information on the screen now and on the next couple of slides and that's because it is probably the most important part of your application. You're using this opportunity to tell us about you in your own words. So this is really a unique part of the personal statements. The personal statement that you submit will be sent to all of your university choices. So that could be up to five different universities. So it's important that the information that you're using and the statement you write is about yourself and is geared towards the subjects that you're interested in, but it's applicable in most cases to more than one university. The amount of content that you can write is capped at 4,000 characters, which usually is roughly about 500 words. It's actually not very much or 47 lines of text. So it's whichever of those you hit first, 4,000 characters or 47 lines of text. And that's determined by the personal statement box in which you submit this information on your application. In your personal statement, lots of people do struggle to actually understand what they need to include in there. They want to know what universities are looking for. So I put four key bullet points here that I think you should be trying to address in your personal statements. Ultimately, you're using this opportunity to explain why you are applying for the course. And you should definitely be highlighting your interests about that relate to your subject. So think about why you're interested in this course. Where did that come from? What have you done to develop that interest and to research and explore it further? You can include some information about academic achievements that are relevant. That can be from the past and from the present. Think about the skills that you've gained from them and what sorts of benefits that they've supported you with. And finally, I think it can also be nice to think about what you will do with your degree. So this could be career aspirations or related to how you think your degree will help you in the future as well. This isn't something that is mandatory to add in, but I think it just shows some forward thinking. It demonstrates to the admission tutors who are reading your application. You've really put some thought into what you want to accomplish from this degree. It is going to be three or four years of your life. So we want to know that you're ready for it and that you're being proactive in how you're thinking and approaching this. You can also think about any skills and experiences that you've had relating to work or volunteering. Any of your hobbies and interests as well. It could be that you've been able to gain some different skills from these, which are also able to be related to the course and your application as well. So there are a few other things that you might want to note in your personal statement. And these are, I guess, a couple of top tips. So I would avoid naming specific universities if you're applying to more than one university, as this can alienate your other choices. They might be a little bit put off to see another university named. I would avoid using elaborate language and cliches. If anything, it's best that you write in your own style. So keep it concise. Keep it fairly simple as well. It's more important that you effectively communicate your ideas, your enthusiasm for the subject, than using the most flowery language as possible. Do remember that the people reading the personal statements have to read quite a lot of these. So for them, they're looking for someone who is a clear communicator and can articulate their points well. It's important to remember that the personal statement is put through some similarity detection software. This is called copy catch. That's the term used by UCAS. Basically, they're comparing the personal statement you submit with all other personal statements submitted, as well as some other key resources from around the web as well. The main idea here is just to make sure that you're using your own words. It's really important that you've not plagiarized and copied your personal statement from someone else because then it's not personal to you. So as long as you write in your own words, this will be absolutely fine. And I would say this last point here, although fairly small, is very important. With your personal statement, I would make a draft. I would edit that draft, read it through, edit it again, redraft it, make another draft. Spend plenty of time looking over what you've written. Read it out loud, ask some trusted people to support you with it as well. Excuse me, the slides just jump forward a little bit there. Spend that time. Yeah, ask someone who is trusted and who can support you there as they'll be able to help pick up any maybe mistakes or grammatical errors, which you might not necessarily pick up quite as quickly if you've been spending lots of time writing it. It can be easy to overlook things. So then you can submit your application. So once you've submitted your application, well, sorry, I should say to submit the application, you will be asked to pay an application fee. So if you just choose to submit to one university or one choice, sorry, this will be £20. If you make two to five choices or you submit your application after the 30th of June, this will be the full amount, which is £26.50. There are a few deadlines to be aware of, and the main UCAS deadline that applies for students who are applying to SOAS is the equal consideration deadline in January. But this year's entry for this September, that is 26th of January, 2022. The students who are applying for next year for 2023, that is set at the 25th of January, 2023. After you submit your application, there will be a 14-day calling off period. So if you do decide within those 14 days to rescind your application and to cancel and withdraw from your choices, then UCAS will be able to refund that money and withdraw your application if needed. So after you submit, I would say the main thing here is just to be patient. Universities will get back to you. It can take for us roughly four to six weeks, but as we get closer to those deadlines and the busier times of year, then this can take a little bit longer. So please just be patient. Once you have submitted it in UCAS and you can see it's submitted, a decision will be made or communicated with you. And I'll talk about those in a second. Once we receive your application, if we do find that it's sort of missing any information or there's anything else that we need to know, we will get in touch with you to ask for this. Something else that you can do is submit any supplementary information to us directly via email. Now, this is not something that's mandatory, but if, for example, you find that your personal statements wasn't able to address the particular course you're applying for at SOAS, say, for example, you're applying for geography for other universities, but you apply for global development while development at SOAS. And you find that you've not been able to write something unique enough that addresses the intricacies of the course you're applying for, then you can submit that supplementary information to us directly by email. But again, it's not something that's required. It's also worth knowing that we don't interview very often, only in a rare case will this sort of be required. So that's probably something you don't need to think about too much for us. And just to highlight how some universities go about making offers and decisions. Some do this as a gathered field approach so they receive all of their applications and then make offers, whereas others, similar to us, do it on a rolling basis as and when we receive them. So with your university decisions, those that come back to you will receive one of three decisions. This could be unconditional, conditional or unsuccessful. Unconditional means that you've been guaranteed a place. Conditional is that your place is conditional, is your place is reliant on something such as passing your exams. An unsuccessful means that we're not able to make you an offer. So once you've received all of those decisions, you can then decide which ones you wish to respond to. So you make a firm choice and you can also decide to make an insurance choice if you would like to. The firm choice is where you will be placed if you meet all of your conditions, such as passing the relevant exams that have been required of you. I'm sorry about the slides jumping forwards. The insurance choice is, I would recommend setting this to somewhere where it's got slightly lower entry requirements. And that's in case you don't meet the requirements for your firm choice. Now, you don't have to select an insurance. This is more if you're, yeah, this is if you maybe don't have an unconditional offer or you're not selecting the unconditional offer. For those students who do have an unconditional, they don't necessarily need to, well, they don't need to select an insurance. But it's there as a backup more for students who have got conditional offers. But most people where possible do try to submit them. You do have a couple of other options as well to take into account. So there is something called extra. This is if you have actually used up all five of your choices and you don't receive any offers. So that could be that you've been declined or you withdraw from all of them as well. Then one by one, you can submit an extra choice into UCAS for consideration by universities. So for this year, you have from the 25th of February to the 4th of July to do this. There's also clearing. You might have heard about this clearing technically opens in early July. But for most people, they'll start thinking about it when their results day takes place. This is for students who again might have received no offers or they've declined all of their other offers. Or they might not have met all of their conditions for entry. So you'll be able to search for vacancies and to add one of these in via your UCAS hub. So I thought it might just be a good idea as well to touch upon entry requirements for some of our courses. So I've only got a limited amount of space to talk about some of these here. There's a much wider range of entry requirements that we are able to consider. Quite popular qualifications that people might be studying such as A levels. We're asking for, depending on the subject, three A's to ABB or for IB looking for 37 points down to 33. If you are interested in one of those foundation years that I mentioned earlier, we'd be looking for much lower grades and this would be at three C's or 30 in the IB. As I say, other qualifications that we'll consider, there are some programs which have their own specific qualifications or they ask for something in addition such as maths GCSE or A level maths. And so that would be for stuff like our finance and management program or economics program as well. For things like BTECs, those qualifications will be reviewed as well in combination with GCSE profile. So again, we are looking at all of those different qualifications that you have. This information about entry requirements can also be found on our website. So I would encourage you to have a look on there if you're studying something that you don't see on here or if you want to find out the exact entry requirements for each of the courses. For joint programs and joint degrees, where you've got two subjects named, the subject with the higher entry requirements is what you will lead with. So for example, we've got politics and Japanese on here. That would be three A's and that's because politics as a single honours ask for three A's even though Japanese only ask for ABB. So if you were just applying for Japanese, it would be ABB but because it's in combination with politics which asks for a higher grade, it is that higher grade. As I mentioned about other UK qualifications, likewise we also accept a whole variety of different international qualifications and on our website we've got a big list where you can find your country and the qualifications that you might have been studying so you can then get a better idea as to what we're looking for there. If you do have any questions about that there, you can also get in touch with us and we can give you some further information about what we'll be looking for from your qualifications. Some further information that might be worthwhile considering is that we do also make contextualised offers and these are for students who we deem to have faced particular barriers in accessing higher education. Our admissions team are trained to support, they're trained to spot information in your application which sort of categorises you as being able to receive a contextualised offer so they've got their criteria and if they find that within your application then they're able to make you a lower offer so usually this will be one grade lower. We are also able to accept students who are looking to transfer in from another UK university. Students can transfer only up into their second year, they can't transfer beyond that so into third or final years. For students who are currently studying, for students who want to study an LLB law with us you have to be studying that exact programme at another university just due to how the entry requirements for that one work so that's something to bear in mind if anyone is considering, if anyone is currently a student at another university looking to transfer, let us know and we can give you some more information about how to go through with that. And it's also important to know that we will also consider mature students naturally but we recognise that mature students might have been out of education for a while or you might not quite meet the minimum entry requirements for the programme that you're looking to study. So with all of that in mind we might suggest that you take an access course or an access to higher education which could be relevant and that can be used perhaps in combination with work experience as well over a number of years to demonstrate your ability and suitability for the course that you're looking to apply to. I did touch upon English language requirements earlier in the presentation. This is for students who are overseas. If you're looking for direct entry onto one of our undergraduate courses then there are a few different tests which we can accept. One of the most common there being the IELTS academic. I've listed the scores for some of those most common ones. If you've got any questions and you want to find out about any of the tests which you might be looking to take and whether we can accept them I would check on our website and the link where you need to look is on our international students page and that web link is just at the bottom of the slide there. There are other ways in which you can demonstrate your English proficiency as well. I've just put two common examples but there are quite a few different things which you can use and that is if you're taking for example an A level or an IB subject in English due to the nature of that subject. But again consider what that qualification is and have a look on the websites for all of those different alternative qualifications which we might be able to accept. For students who do need to improve their English language abilities there are recessional and incessional courses which you might be asked to take and as well as those you might be interested in some of the other provisions offered by our foundation college. The first being the Access to English Language Studies programme which is an online sort of language training course which helps to prepare students who are looking to come and study at SOAS and that's really designed to bridge the gap between roughly a 4.5 in your IELTS to bring you up to a 5.5 and that will assist with gaining entry onto the ICC the International Foundation programme which is the next one on the screen. So the ICC is really for international students who have English as a second language or an additional language but they want to study an undergraduate degree so this is to bring your IELTS scores up from roughly a 5.5 up to the level that they're needed to be at for entry onto our undergraduate programmes. So these are both things which you might want to look for and if this is something that applies to you you can have a look on our website for more information about these. So I'm going to move on and talk briefly about fees and funding. There is another webinar which will be coming up which covers fees, funding, scholarships in much greater detail as well so I won't go into rooms of information right now just highlight some of the basics that you might need to know. If you are interested in that webinar I'll highlight the date for that at the end of these slides. So with tuition fees for undergraduate students who are home based currently each year is set at 9,250. For international students for this year has been set to 20,350 and for any of those students who are looking to go onto the International Foundation that programme that I've just mentioned that's currently set to 21,320. If you're unsure about whether you should be paying home or international fees then there is a fee status questionnaire which you can take and submit to our admissions team and that's available on the websites. I would say that with that if you are unsure you can proactively submit that to them but at the same time we will use the information that you provide in your UCAS application to make a sort of decision there but if you do think that the decision that's been made is incorrect again you can also submit that fee status questionnaire. So there are different means of which you might go about applying for some funding to support you throughout your studies. For home students you can apply for student finance and this comes in two different sections. The first is a tuition fee loan which covers all of your fees and then the second is a means tested loan which covers your maintenance costs. So this depends on household income and depending on how much your household income is depends on how much you're eligible to borrow for the means tested maintenance loan. So that's paid directly to you whereas the tuition fee loan is paid directly to the university that you're applying through. For students who are looking to study in London so at SOAS there is actually an increased amount in which you're able to borrow for the maintenance loan and that's just in recognition that sometimes London can be a bit more expensive than some other areas of the country. So that does make things a little bit easier for you hopefully. But overseas students this really depends on where you're applying from and where you're based. There's lots of different financial aid options which are available but these are often specific to the country that you're in or that you've got links to. So I've highlighted just a couple of popular ones there. US federal loans, Indian Cradella loans but there is there by no means the only things that are available. You will hopefully be able to have a little bit of information about this from your own research but you can also again look on our website under the fees and funding sections in the international sections to find out some of the other options and alternatives that might be out there depending on where you're from. And finally on funding I just want to touch upon sort of scholarships, awards, bursaries which might be available as well. There are a fairly limited number of these for students who are undergraduates so please don't necessarily think that you're going to be able to definitely rely on these but there are some awards that are out there so I did think it was worth just highlighting a couple of them and you can have a look at the website for a full list of these as well to get some more information. Two to highlight, one is the SOAS Sanctuary Scholarship. That's for a UK resident with limited leave to remain or similar status and there's full information about that on the website and that's a scholarship to cover fees but that's done by application. Whereas there is a SOAS bursary which is done by an automatic award or allocation. This is for students and is based on the new undergraduate students is based on financial need. So when you submit your UCAS application, there's a box to tick in which you can opt to share your financial details with the university you're applying to. If you do this the universities will then be able to make an assessment as to whether there's any additional financial support that they have available which you qualify for. So this is based for us, this is based on household income and a variety of other factors as well and there's a number of these bursaries which have been available. So that's a couple to highlight that have been available in the last couple of years. Hopefully we'll be going forwards. There are also some external funding opportunities as well with people that with companies and awarding bodies which we're aware of or have partnerships with. So I've listed a couple of these on the screen at the moment which you might like to explore further. Again as I say the website has got much more information than I can cover just in a couple of slides or you can join that fees and funding webinar as well in the future. So just before I cover the webinars there are also a number of open events coming up which I would really recommend no matter which part of your journey you're in in your application journey. The first is an undergraduate open day taking place online on Saturday 15th of January so that's coming up very soon. We then have an undergraduate taster day online. This is to give a more specific insight into what each subject is like and what it's like to study a particular subject. Whereas the open day will be more of an opportunity to meet academics, meet students and find out some other bits about SOAS as well. So there's two options which are fairly similar but do cover slightly different content. It's also the Global Challenges Forum which will be online. This is a great introduction into SOAS, into our research, the academics who are involved. This really highlights the multidisciplinary approach to research that we take. So I would recommend joining that as well if you're interested in that side of things. Then for students who have been able to apply, there is an undergraduate applicant day but this will only be available by email invitation. So this isn't something you can sign up for online. You will be emailed with an invitation to this if you're eligible to attend. This is a great opportunity especially for students who maybe haven't been able to visit SOAS so far. This will give you a day on campus finding out what it's like to study your subjects, meeting your peers, meeting academics and current students.  And then finally as we move into the summer in June, we're hoping to hold our undergraduate open day on campus. And again that's an opportunity for people to come onto campus to find out more about life at SOAS. And that is more particularly aimed at students who are entering for 2023. For those events which are open for registration or to register your interests and more generally, you can visit our websites and the events section there. We'll have more information about each of those. And similarly in that area you'll also find some information about webinars and I've touched upon these a couple of times during this presentation. So upcoming we currently have a Careers Employability and Alumni webinar in the next couple of weeks in January. Then in early February there's the Feast Funding and Scholarships one which I've mentioned a couple of times. Towards the end of March there's an accommodation webinar so that's really helpful for any students who are currently applying to SOAS and will be shortly holding offers which is followed then by our Meet Our Students webinar. So find out from current students what life is like at SOAS. And then if you're an international student needing to apply for a student visa or a CAS, you'll be likely interested in our final webinar listed on the screen on the 28th of April. I would really encourage you to attend that one if that's relevant to you. There's some very important information and timelines which are highlighted in that. So again you can sign up for those online when you're ready. Most of those webinars run once or twice and where they are running, often you get two times lots to choose from on the days that they're running as well. So plenty of opportunities. And similar to this one, if you do sign up and can't attend in the end, it will be emailed out to you. So I would encourage you to have a look at some of those. Okay, and finally that brings us to the end. We do still have a little bit of time available. So I'll open up the questions box and see if we've got anything in there. And I'll invite Laura to join me as well. Hi everyone, my name is Laura. I also work in the student recruitment team. So I'm here with Dan to answer any questions that you have this afternoon. I think we've already got through quite a few of your questions. So if anybody does have any more questions that they still want to ask, do feel free to get those into us. Perhaps something that would be good to talk about. We often get asked about it is some of the sorts of things that you can include in your personal statement to sort of help yourself stand out. So obviously a personal statement is your main opportunity to promote yourself, to demonstrate your sort of suitability for the program. So some suggestions of things that you might want to include in your personal statement are why obviously you're interested in the subject, any relevant experience you have. So whether that's work experience or we know a lot of students don't have work experience and that's absolutely fine. Whether it might be sort of more general life experience and cultural experience that you want to draw upon. Any taster days or master classes that you attended, whether that's in person or whether that's online. Skills and qualities that you have and how you can sort of talk about the activities that you've done both academically and extracurricular and draw upon the skills that you've used in those activities and how they relate to the program. Any sort of personal achievements, gap year plans, career aspirations, any independent reading that you've done or any documentaries, podcasts you've listened to, any visits you've made to museums and galleries. All of these sorts of things are really useful things to include in a personal statement and you can use the ABC method. So that's activity, benefit and course. The activity you've done, the benefit of the activity that you've done and how that relates back to the course that you're applying for as well. So just some tips there as to what you can think about when you're writing a personal statement. Great, thanks Laura. There was a question that has been asked which it looks like Lisa answered. But I think it could be something which is really important actually for more people just to think about and it might be on the mind of others. So someone asked whether there, if their predicted grades are slightly lower than the entry requirements that we're asking for, is it worth them applying? Is there still a chance or an opportunity for them? And I would really still encourage you to make an application. We do understand that predicted grades aren't necessarily exactly what you will achieve on the day. We know that especially over the last couple of years as well things have been very difficult with the pandemic and COVID and everything that's happened there and how that's affected your education and yourselves. So we know that it's been a whole period of turbulence as well. So things might be a little bit all over the place, shall we say. But if you do find that even your predicted grades are slightly lower than the entry requirements, I would still encourage you to apply. The admissions team will review your application in its entirety.  And this is then giving you the opportunity to hopefully perform to that level. If results day comes around and you still unfortunately miss the entry requirements, the admissions team do assess this again and see if there is any opportunity there. Sometimes naturally they won't be able to go through with that and enroll you. But I think in terms of actually that first point of actually making an application, it's good to aim high and to challenge yourself. And I would, if you are deciding to make five choices, then I would think about making two which are maybe slightly higher than your predicted grades. I'd probably make two which are on par or level with your predicted grades and then one which is a little bit lower. And that's more of like your backup choice as well. So that's how some people choose to structure it. But the short answer is that I think it's probably still worth giving it a go. Especially if you're really interested in studying that course and at university. So we've had a question from Pratima about the differences between the LLB from India and the LLB from SOS. So I'd say an LLB from India will be probably particularly suited towards the Indian legal system, whereas the SOS LLB covers English law. And so it's the qualifying law degree that will allow you to progress in the legal field in the UK. So I'd advise you to check to see if your qualification, whatever degree you choose to take will be accepted in the country where you're planning to go on to work after you graduate in the field of work that you're planning to go on to work in. So that'd be sort of the best advice I have about that one. So there's been a question about the personal statements that get submitted in UCAS and whether we need to enter line breaks between paragraphs as that will increase characters and increases the number of lines above 47 just putting a space being up to separate paragraphs. Yeah, so I'd encourage that, firstly, when you're writing a personal statement, and this isn't something that I explicitly touched upon, I'd probably first write it in a word processor of your choosing and structure it exactly how you need to, but be aware that when you then copy and paste that into the UCAS personal statement box, that will actually remove all of the formatting as well. And universities are very familiar with the lack of formatting that the personal statement box really allows. If you do have space and you can make some paragraph spacing, that is important where possible. It does make it a little bit easier to read, but I would be, it's more important that you are able to include the sort of number of characters that you're looking for. So if you find that once you've entered into that box, that paragraph spacing is a bit of an issue, maybe you'll find that doing some indentation or something like that works a little bit better for you. So yeah, that's probably what I would look at there. I think UCAS have also themselves got some really good information and guidance about this on their own website. So if you head to the UCAS website on the personal statement section, they cover things like this and they're obviously the experts on that. So I'd have a look there. We've had a question from Abdul Salam about what the average time frame is, which decision for an application will be sent back through UCAS. So it's asked that's between about four to six weeks. It can be longer or shorter than that, just depending on whether the application is complete when it's submitted and whether we need to ask you for any further information. And also just depending on the volume of applications at that particular time. So obviously we're approaching the UCAS deadline, which is the 26th of January. So it is a very busy period for our admissions team, but they will try to process those decisions as quickly as possible after the deadline as well. And they will be processed in the order in which they come into us as well. A question there about the senior status LLB program. The funding opportunities available for the program for international students. Laura, do you know much about the admissions criteria and the period for applying to the senior status LLB? So the senior status LLB program is applied through the usual UCAS application form. So the time frame for applying for that is very similar to all of the other undergraduate applications for other undergraduate programs at SOAS. It is slightly different in that you do need an undergraduate degree in a different or a similar area at undergraduate level before you then go on to take the senior status LLB program. So it's kind of a unique program at SOAS. What we'd be looking for is a 2-1 in your undergraduate degree to be able to apply to that one. In terms of funding opportunities available for the program, I'm not too sure. What we can do is we can go away and find out and get back to you and see if we can find out about funding opportunities for that one. It may be worth having a chat to the admissions tutor for the program. He can be found on the course page on the SOAS website with their contact details. They might be able to point you in the direction of any possible funding that they are aware of for that program. But as you do usually need an undergraduate degree to then be able to apply to the senior status LLB program, things like the UK student loans don't normally apply to that particular program. So it might be that you would need to find an alternative source of funding for that one. Great, thank you. I had a question about the application fee and if there's a waiver for this. I presume you mean the fee that you cash charge. I'm not aware personally of any waiver. Laura, if you do know of one, please do jump in. That's not something that I've personally come across before. So I think the answer to that is that no, that there isn't one. Do you have a couple more minutes? I think that's the end of the questions which have been submitted, but I'll just leave it for another few seconds for anyone who does have any more questions that they would like to ask. In the meantime, I'll just highlight the inquiries email address. If you do want to get in touch with us after this session is over, you can email us at study so ask.ac.uk. That is on the screen at the moment. And I've just popped it into the chat box as well. I've not seen any more questions come in. So I'll take that as hopefully that we've answered all of yours. Thank you everyone for attending and just say thank you to Laura and Lisa in the background for answering your questions as well as you went through. That does bring us to the end. I hope you've enjoyed the webinar and do remember that you can watch the recording back and that'll be sent out to you. Thank you very much.


We move from formal requirements to quality criteria. If your project passes the eligibility criteria, then it will be assessed against a number of quality requirements. The relevance of the project The project will be considered relevant, if it, corresponds to the specific context of youth work implemented by partner organisations, matches the clearly identified needs of the youth workers who will participate in it, matches the objectives of this subsection, which is the professional development of youth workers. The project should provide plenty of possibilities for the youth workers to learn about what really matters in their work with young people. In this way, better prepared youth workers will increase the capacity of youth work organisations and the quality of youth work. The quality of the project design and implementation. This area outlines the quality of the project structure and the main content. When it comes to project structure, the project should obviously be logically connected. The aims and objectives of the project should be clearly linked with the identified needs. The aims and objectives should be broken down into an action plan and specific methodology. Preparation, implementation and follow-up of the mobility project should be logically linked to each other. And finally, the budget should be clearly linked to the duration, size of the group and distances travelled. Let's look closer at the quality of preparation. It's the period of time before the actual mobility starts, so before the participants leave home for their international learning journey. However, the preparation is already part of the entire project and should be well planned and implemented. What are the key quality demands for the preparation period? Equal partnership based on ongoing communication and cooperation between partners. Partners are expected to cooperate in working out the detailed content of the activities. They should agree on how participants should be selected, prepared and what organisational and educational support they might need. The hosting partner, meanwhile, should take care of logistical matters, like venue, food, safety measures and materials for the activity. The hosting partner is also often in charge of making contact with local organisations who might be somehow involved in the activity. Organisers of the activity should involve participants in working out the final content of the project. Organisers should devise tools to make it possible to review participants' learning needs, dietary requirements and any other information which could be important for the preparation stage. The team of facilitators might need to prepare a special info letter or virtual conference, which would allow participants to clarify any questions and get to know the preparatory tasks related to the project. When it comes to implementation, the main focus is on the quality of the methodology. The project should clearly identify how a certain chosen methodology can lead to the achievement of the project's educational objectives and how the methodology corresponds to the participant's profiles and specific learning needs. It is essential that the activity programme is built around educational principles. Organisers should take the following into consideration. Group dynamic. Needs of participants. Balance between methodology and responding to diverse learning preferences. Key principles of non-formal learning. The quality of impact and dissemination. The project is not over when the main activity is finished and all participants have left. The expectation is that your project will become known by others and will have an impact beyond the direct group of participants. When preparing the project, you should think about who else could benefit from such a project and in what way. Of course, the greatest impact will be felt by the project participants themselves, but there are also benefits at the organisation level. The impact can reach the young people that a participating youth worker is working with. Depending on the nature of the mobility project, the local community may also feel an impact. Naturally, the better the quality of the project, the greater the impact. When it comes to dissemination of project results, there are various activities that project organisers can carry out to share information and results with the wider community of youth work beyond the participating organisations. As the projects are funded by public money, the expectation is that others should know about them and be able to benefit from their results. The quality of dissemination means that project organisers should choose appropriate communication channels and effective ways of disseminating project results. Organisers should clearly identify stakeholders and target groups in their dissemination plan, specific dissemination methods should be outlined, illustrating how you will reach the target groups and make an impact. All of this should be well planned and described in the application form. If you wish to learn different ways of disseminating project results, please check the additional resources provided in this section. In order to assess the impact of a mobility project, you need to implement an appropriate evaluation process. A quality evaluation is another criterion which is particularly important for mobility of youth workers. Any organiser should aim to provide both a formative and a summative evaluation. The formative evaluation is carried out during the activity and it supports the process of learning. The summative evaluation, meanwhile, is usually carried out at the end of activity and at the end of the entire project in order to assess how far the objectives have been reached. Please see the additional resources on evaluation theories and methods.


So, good morning once again. So, as you know, Dr. Sameer Sahasrabudde is going to engage with you for several sessions from next session onwards. Talking to you about visual communication, particularly about the skills in setting up your graphics and also how to organize your concepts so that you can present them properly. But because the main theme of this entire course is improving our ability to articulate ourselves properly while composing technical literature, if you recall we have taken a single task for the entire course as the most important task and that is to prepare a report, technical report on your own. And again to reiterate, this report will primarily be based on your own interests in research pertaining to the seminars that you have registered. Preparing a seminar report of the best quality and presenting it to the best of your abilities is the target of this course. Now to begin with, any research begins with understanding how other people have looked at the problem that you are trying to solve and that is mostly done through a process called literature survey. All of you are familiar with literature survey. So anybody who has conducted a literature survey earlier before coming to IIT, how come when I said are you familiar with literature survey, everybody sort of nodded, but when I said have you conducted a literature survey ever, only one hand partially was raised. So what is it? Let us speak loudly. Have you conducted a literature survey earlier before coming to IIT? One yes and few yes, alright. Have you heard the term literature survey? Can you guess what literature survey could mean? Surveying an existing topic from what point? Because a topic has multiple facets. So surveying a topic from the point of view of technical literature that has been written to solve problems associated with that topic. You do not read technical literature as a storybook. You read it to enhance your own knowledge and understanding of what other people have done about that topic. Once you define a problem, you have to actually describe some aspects of that problem to yourself. What are you going to solve? What problem are you solving? And then you start searching for literature or papers presented typically in conferences or journals to find out which of those papers, and there are millions of papers for various topics, which of those papers pertain to a, the topic that you are working on, the problem that you are solving and subsequently having collected 50, 60, 100 such references, you then say, alright, out of these 100 references, we seem to be generically indicating some work related to this problem. The specific problem that I am interested in is perhaps dealt with by only these 5 or 7 papers. Then you read those 5 or 7 papers more carefully and present your finding and understanding in the form of a report. That is essentially a literature survey. So you survey the available literature. Please note that you might miss out on some important contribution made somewhere just because you have not searched well enough. So the first task in the literature survey is to search the world globally. In old days, traditionally, the only access to information was through journals and conference proceedings. I remember in my intake time as well as subsequently PhD time, we used to go to library and jot down relevant references. Any time a new journal issue comes in or a new proceedings come in, you will go there IEEE or computer society, whatever, whatever, ACM, and you will scan through them. This is one paper which could be useful. That is one paper which could be useful. How do you organize that information? Do you just remember in IEEE volume published in last February 2015, I saw that paper. For two days, you may remember that. Two days later, I saw some paper. Ten days later, I think I saw something. Don't remember. So do you write down? Forget the literature survey. Whenever you read a book or whenever you listen to a lecture, do you take notes? You do. Note taking itself is an art by the way. It's an art of communication. So listening to a lecture and taking notes is an important point. I believe that is being covered or has been covered in the issued course. But coming back to our literature survey, one of the problems that is constantly faced by all our M.Tech and PhD students is that whenever they submit a project report, whether it is an MTP or seminar report or first stage of annual PhD research or whatever, they will invariably have a list of references. Everybody has read at least one research paper in life or not yet? Anybody who has not read any research paper from any journal or conference? Oh, not a single Brave Hulk. Anyway. So all of you are familiar with the way the papers are written, right? At the end of each paper, you will find citations, references which are cited in the text. You are familiar with that also? How is a reference written? So in a seminar report or an MTP or a PID, thesis or a progress report, invariably at the end of the report, you will have references. How are you expected to write them? There is a standardization. Forget rest of the world. Department of Computer Science and Engineering issues a standardization. How many of you are familiar with that standard? None of you.  Please explore the department wiki. Please explore the material that is available in your own department, on your own department website and find out how the references are read. Why I am emphasizing this point is that people in their list of references typically will write the names of the authors. Often a single name, initials missing. They will write the title, which will always be approximately accurate, not exact. They will occasionally write the journal in which it was published or the conference in which it was present. They will invariably forget to give the reference of the year in which it was published, the volume in which it was published, the page numbers which was published and if there is an ISBN number. Are you familiar with ISBN numbers associated with books and proceedings? Do you really go to physical library ever or don't? You do. So you know ISBN. So can you explain what is ISBN? So what she is saying is that every book is assigned a unique number. It is not an arbitrary sequential number. It's actually a coded number. But those of you who do not know about it should find out what is ISBN, what is that ISBN number and so on. Please note that the method and the discipline of writing percolates to proper organization of information as well. And book is probably the most organized form of presentation. We'll talk more about book writing and book reading. But the second problem is even if your reference is correct, you will invariably rush to library or rush to your resource at the end of writing your report saying, what is the exact reference? Because in the first instance, when you visited that paper, you forgot to jot down the important things. Now I'll tell you the discipline that we were taught when there were no computers. We're all used to be given index cards, small postcard size thing with the lines. And our gurus will tell us that when you go to the library, you see a good paper. You glance through it all right. But the minimum information that you must jot down on this index card is the title of the paper, the journal or conference in which it appeared, the names of the authors and the abstract. Why? Because abstract is supposed to give you the gist of that paper. When you first time look at it, you don't even know whether that paper is going to be useful to you or not. You don't know. So you write down the abstract topic. Today, when you get access to such papers on net, you invariably will search through glance on the screen and forget about it. You might jot down just the name of the author or something like that. That is the beginning of a huge nuisance for you because you will end up spending time later in compiling the same information again and again. And if you don't, you will get at least one downgrade in your grade because your references are not properly written. You will get another downgrade in your grade because the reference that you are citing in your text and the sentences accompanying that citation do not indicate any connection with what was discussed in that paper because you have forgotten. So first principle, whenever you look at a paper, you must actually prepare a growing document like this. So for example, roll number 051013 Deepak Phatak, topic teaching and learning programming. That's the problem I am looking at. So for teaching and learning programming, I write list of references and abstracts. This is a soft copy I am preparing. I have not written a single line here except the top, my name, etc. All others are extracted from the search that I made on the web, but notice the way I have jotted it down. First, A.C. Latinin, Christy Almukta, Hanumati Jhervinan, these are the authors. A study of the difficulties of novice programmers. Proceedings of ITIC is 05. Proceedings of the 10th annual 6CAC Conference of Innovation and Technology in Compressorized Education. Pages 14 to 80, ACM, New York, NY, USA. Copyright 2005, ISB and this. Many of you might be seeing all these details carefully for the first time. But these are the minimum details that must be there in every reference that you cite anywhere. If you don't do that, it's not a question of losing grade. You will be considered sloppy. If a paper that you present which contains your brilliant technical work and if that paper is presented with such sloppy references, people will simply ignore that try-down. If you want to make an impact, you have to be perfect. And this is the perfection, first step. So is that clear? That means when you start the literature survey, you'll be scanning, as I said, 50, 70, 100, 30 papers across the globe. You know how to search papers? How do you search the literature? Digital. One way, of course, traditionally go to library and look at the reference. But how do you search them? Google search. And Google scholar. Google scholar, those of you who do not know this, please write down the name. Google scholar and Google search. Google search, of course, everybody knows. In fact, there is a verb called Google the date, which means search the name. And Google scholar will give you a lot of them. And there are digital assets. Our library subscribes to a large number of online journals and conference proceedings. I do not know whether you are aware of that or not. But for your own sake, please find out which are the journals, which are the conferences for which IIT Bombay Library digitally subscribes to. Find out how do you get an authenticated user ID for use? It's a shared usage. But you can find out this. Now what is most important is when you search something, whether it's a physical journal, in which case you methodically type down the name abstract and all these details. If it's a digital journal, you extract that information like. So this is just a sample sheet I have put up on the net. By the way, that reminds me, how many of you actually read the two documents which I had sent a mail to you to read before coming to the class? One, very sporadic. You're making a mockery of the flipped classroom. The whole concept hinges on the fact that people will actually study some basic material at home so that we can have more lively discussions. From the blank looks on your faces, I could figure out that most of you have not read this. Please don't do that next time. Proceedings. Whatever is the proceedings are the reference paper. You see pages 32 to 36 are pages of that publication for which the ISBN number is given, or for which the ACMC SC bulletin archive, volume 39. So this is actually a reference matter. Means there exists some printed copy somewhere guarantee. It brings me to another question. You might find several references which are actually give a very detailed account of some solution for your problem but they're not published in a proceeding or something. This is a web paper. How would you refer to that? Any idea? Yeah, sorry. URL and excess date. URL so that other people can refer to URL. Why is excess date important? Content might change. You see that's a fundamental difference between a printed material and a web material. A printed material does not change. A new edition may subsequently come but once printed it remains permanent imprint. If I have a web page in which I publish a good paper today and then I suddenly say, oh, I have actually written something wrong. It's my web page so I change it. Now you go and cite that reference with the original writing and the person who is examining you say, but this is not what Fatak said. He said, no, no, sir, this is what Fatak said. Now the teacher goes and looks at the Fatak's page, finds out it's completely different than what you have done. So the excess date is important but is it adequate? Supposing he says, no, no, no, I have excess Fatak website in December 2015. Now the my examiner or your examiner will say, how do I know that this was the content in 2015? Because what I see is this. Let us go ask Fatak what was the published material. Can you do that? No. Therefore, every paper that you cite from the web, not only you must give excess don, but you must download that paper and keep it with you as a soft asset. Must. No choice. If you don't do that, you may even fail a course. You may fail a seminar for wrongly representing, for no fault of yours. Am I adequately being emphatic? No choice in that. Either you give a proper reference to a printed or a published thing. If it's a web page, not only say excess on this date, but also download that copy and keep it with the file name of your choice, but the date on which the file was created must have the date on which you claim you have downloaded. You can't say excess on this date and two months later download it. Then there is a mismatch between your citation and the file creation. Of course people can do fancy stuff by changing the date and time of the computer and then creating something etc. But we believe we are all honest and decent people. We won't do that. So this is the first task. This list would be a growing list. And this initial survey which is almost a random head, random search, all that you are looking for certain keywords which pertain to your problem area. And it is not uncommon to create the first list of 50-60 references. By the way it would take roughly two days and two nights of searching to just get the first cut list of 50 or 60. Now do you read all 60 papers seriously? No, you can't unless you are doing a very detailed survey kind of paper itself. But you generally glance through those papers. So how do you read a research paper? Now some of you have read the paper which I had put up on the web. Not very many. Some. So how much time did you spend on reading that paper? It was an eight or nine page paper. Thirty minutes. That's a very long time. Anybody else who has read that? So you listen to Professor Sahana Murthy telling us on how to read a research paper. That's an art by the way. Since most of you are silent and you have no clue on how to properly read a research paper, I think it is worthwhile to look at what she says. Another session on how to read a research paper. By now you might have undergone several sessions in which you may have heard of the scientific process, the various... I will be uploading this and another lecture by her. It's unfortunately a full one-hour lecture. So you might have to listen to both these lectures in succession. I'll be putting both these on the web so you can download and watch yourself. But I'll be playing some parts of these contents because they are extremely relevant, particularly of the stages in which you ought to read any one research paper. The point is, if you spend, say, thirty-four, forty minutes, which is a good thing that you did, but imagine this, you have collected at least a hundred papers. Now, each paper you spend forty to fifty minutes to understand that paper completely and then realize that this paper does not add any value to the problem that you are solving. You have wasted fifty minutes of your time with some useless knowledge added to your memory. You can't afford to do that with hundred papers, fourteen to hundred minutes. How much is that? Four thousand minutes. How many hours? And you have other nice and interesting things to do in life than literature, sir. You can't afford to do that. You can't afford to do that for five or six papers. But which five? So that is how you do the staging. Let us look at this. She is Professor Sanamurthy, by the way, a faculty member in our intensive program on educational technology. She works very closely with Professor Seetha Raiyer of her department and has done some extraordinary research and finding which has helped us propagate across the country the use of flip classroom and active learning. Parts of the research process, the scientific method, the skills required while doing learning or science background, I agree, but the kind of guidelines we are talking about are not specific to any one discipline. They are mostly reasonable. Just to give you the context, there was a workshop that we conducted when we trained ten thousand teachers across the country for the first time. The title of the workshop was Research Methodology. This was coordinated by Professor Karmal Kaur of IIT Madras, whom we had specially called in. Professor Sachin from Chemical Engineering, a lot of people. Sunoj was there, several people, very good people. In that, as a part of that workshop, we are trying to tell the participating teachers because you see, our teachers in most of the institutions come from our own ill. Several of them have not even done their MTA, very few have done PID. So they have not been initiated into research and therefore this was organized and that is the reason why it appears generally. It does not say computer science because the lecture was not intended for computer scientists alone, but an important. So these are the guidelines that she is going to talk about. It will be applicable to computer science, electrical engineering, as opposed to read as a pre-homework to the session. It is called design and deployment of flickers in distance education. I am assuming that you have read it because a lot of examples that we will be doing today are based on that paper. And it would be good if you have a printout of the paper. No, I did not bring a printout because I presumed that you would have read that paper. But given that only two or three people or four people have read that paper, this whole exercise will flow tangentially to your head. I will still do it very quickly, but please understand that when you view this lecture, either keep a printout on your hand or keep that paper open in another window and in one window you play this video. Then you will be able to understand and correlate, but let me just tell you the basic steps. In front of you, maybe one for every page is to get the big picture on that paper. And it would be good if you have a printout of the paper in front of you, maybe one for every two or three participants. And if you do not, perhaps the coordinators can help at this point. When she says coordinators, whom is she referring to any idea? Remember, she is talking to 10,000 teachers across the country. These 10,000 teachers don't assemble at a single place. The mechanism that I have set up is we have more than 300 remote centers. In this particular workshop, about 200 of them participated. At each remote center, 30-40 teachers would assemble. And those 30-40 teachers, participating teachers, their activities will be coordinated by one workshop coordinator. She is referring to a coordinate. So like we have a classroom here and let's say Sana Murthy speaking from IIT Kharagpur. So I will be your coordinator asking you to do the same thing. There is almost a kind of a group discussion or a team discussion facilitated by a coordinator. But look at the three-plus stage approach for reading a research page. Please read this carefully. I will quickly play the portion that she talks about. Stage zero, get a feel. Stage one, get the big picture. Stage two, get the details. Stage three, evaluate the details. And you reach stage three plus only if you are convinced that that paper is actually relevant to what you are doing. But anyway, let's quickly go through this process so that you understand. So let's actually look at the approach of how to read a research paper. And we have called it the three-plus stage approach here. Now there is a lot of references and a lot of people have given good advice on how to read a research paper. So what we will talk about today is really, it has been borrowed from some things that people have already said. I'll tell you sometime later towards the end of this talk on where to find some of these good references. And most of them talk about the approach to reading a research paper in a process which looks like what you see on this slide here. The zero at stage, so this is really before you actually begin the first stage, is what I call get a feel for the paper. And each of these boxes we are going to expand in the next few minutes. Feel is something very quick. It's literally a feel. You may just pick up a paper like this and you may flip through it. First important stage is to get the big picture. Then one gets the details from the paper, one evaluates the details and to get a good idea of the paper one has to at least go through stage three. And if you are a research student or a researcher who is using the paper for your current work, you often have to go to stage three plus where you have to synthesize the details. Okay, so let's get a look at what you mean by get a feel for the paper and how to do it. By the way, each stage will require one reading of the paper. So when you read a research paper, it's a multi, you'll have to read it multiple times. In fact, that's one of the questions we explore later. So how do you get a feel? First thing is read the simplest thing, the largest thing on the paper and the largest font is usually the title. So read the title. Ponder upon it if you'd like for few seconds. And then as I mentioned earlier, pick up the paper and see how long it is. And papers vary in length a lot. The variation is really huge. It can be as small as four papers and sometimes you see reflection papers as small as two pages. And sometimes they might go 30 or 40 pages. So you need to get an idea of how large the paper is. And typically, the length of the paper also depends on the type or where it's been published. For example, conference papers for technical research conferences are usually between four and eight pages. Journal articles are longer and these can be small, like five or six pages, can actually even be four, but it can go up to 15 or 20 pages, typically. Review or survey papers are usually much longer. If you can get a review or survey paper on your topic, then that's a goldmine, because somebody has done exactly what you are attempting to do, a literature survey. But the entire paper is only about literature. So I'm not going to add any new value, but I'm for the benefit of all co-researchers in the world, I'm actually compiling information about 50, 100 research papers. Each one of them is methodically studied to stage three plus and then consolidated. I'm just presenting to you on a platter what you would take months to research or search, right? We are not fortunate to get this because it is unfortunately not considered the most important contribution that a researcher can make, and therefore very few researchers venture into writing such papers. Only when you have made a name for yourself and you are established as a dada in the field, then you can afford the luxury of doing such survey papers etc, but not till. Okay, the next thing you need to know when you are just getting a feel for the paper is where is this paper published? The bibliographic details as we call it. And one needs to know how to find this information and where to find this information. So bibliographic details, where was the paper published?  I have seen seminar presentations after seminar presentations where the examiner's team is berating the student not for lack of talent reflected in the work, but because of the useless manner in which the references have been compiled. And in fact, every examiner these days looks at your introduction, abstract, conclusion, and reference. And if the references are sloppily written, the examiner mentally decides to give you either a fail grade or just a pass grade, independent of the nature of you. That is the importance of organizing. So I cannot overstate that case. And in spite of my stating this every year, again and again I find that the references which are compiled and presented in your research papers are very shortly written. Please don't ever do that. Typically what happens is it's available, if you have downloaded the paper from the journal website or if you have photocopied it from a specific journal, you should look at the header or the footer of the page and you will find that information. If you have downloaded it from a website, from let's say somebody's personal page, see if they give bibliographic details. And what we mean by these details are the year, the title, the journal, where it's been published and so on. So before reading the research paper in details, if you follow my style of compiling the base material, you would have automatically done this. So getting the feel for a paper is what you will actually do for every paper that you do for hundreds of papers before going through the details of any paper. That is the suggested approach. And the feel you get not only by flipping through the pages and reading it, but even on a web, you do exactly it. But what I am adding is while you do that, independent of whether that paper is going to be useful to you or not, please extract this material. You just have to copy paste on a document and keep it. It doesn't take too long. You might be helping yourself, most important. If not, you might be helping others. Because what you are creating is actually some kind of a collection of survey papers. At least the names and titles and abstracts. Look at the figures. Just glance at them, see what you think and read the headings. So when we say get a feel for the paper, this is all you do. So look at the figures just like a storybook, graphs, figures. What do they make something? And read the section and subsection headings. If you read the section and subsection headings along with the title, you will get a feel for that paper. Do you agree? It's common sense, right? But we don't apply. Typically we start reading a paper completely. We should not do that actually. And this can take as little as one minute sometimes. We'll come to how long should I spend on a research paper. We'll come to this question little later. But this is really getting a quick feel. In fact, you'd be able to get a feel of a paper much quicker than it took me to go through this slide. So we will have to look at before we go on to getting the details of a paper is that the scientific research paper is actually a very peculiar piece of writing. It's not a story, but it's not a story. Let me digress here a bit and tell you about something else which is very relevant. If you look at what she has written, it's highly structured, almost predictable headings. Every item in paper exists for a reason, nothing merely for cosmetic reason. That is the difference between a story and a research paper. And each part connected with other parts, sentence, section one, sequence is important, and figure and text correlation. All this makes sense. In fact, books are written like that, chapters, etc. Now I pose a completely different problem related to how human beings understand world and anything in the world, and how human beings make a model in their mind of whatever knowledge they have learned. Anybody has read about this? How many of you are familiar with the term concept maps? Anybody has heard this? No. It's a new wine in the old bottle. It actually represents the way most human beings think and learn.  When we are growing up, we are not learning research or anything, we are not even going to school, but we are learning about the world. What are the typical things that we learn? Let's say we are admitted to kindergarten or first standard or something like that, just starting to go to school. First we learn a language. Through the language we try to identify things, okay, fixing the nomenclature in our mind and associate it with that nomenclature in number of other first sets which come to us. As a child, what would I say?  Father is another concept. Sibling could be third concept. Food is another concept. Okay. Now as a child, when you think of food, what do you associate the food with? Father, sibling, always mother. Okay, fight. When you grow up, you start fighting with your father and mother, but that is much later. You will find that there are umpteen such things and there are cross-correlated. You suddenly discover that while your mother takes care of food, father takes care of your study, but if you misbehave, both join hands together and bash you. So there is a relationship between. This is how we build. This is called a concept map. Now without going into further details, you can easily imagine that it is natural.  We have no way of figuring out how the brain does it. As somebody said, brain mapping, you cannot measure the neurons flowing through the connections to figure out how the brain thinks. That's a different thing altogether. But the fact of life is that the brain maps these concepts and the network in their mind. That is how we all learn. All of us will always have concepts and relations. Why I am saying this is now look at not just the research paper, but any book or any write-up that you do. Any write-up is essentially sequential, right? So you have paragraph, paragraph, paragraph, paragraph, paragraph. You had the most of chapter, paragraph, paragraph, paragraph. Of course when you want to represent, let us say multiple things related to a topic, you may have separate sections. These sections must appear sequentially because that is the nature of any writing, any script is sequential. However, you may be able to represent the interrelationship between concepts such by saying that this is chapter, this is section one, this is section two. But section three may be related to section two. If they are not necessarily independent sections, they may be sequenced also. Within section there will be paragraph. In short, any writing that is done is essentially sequential and at best it can represent a tree. Agreed? At best it can represent a tree. There is no way some section here can refer to this. In fact it is done which is called cross-referencing. But in a printed text when you go to page 56 and it says look up page 25. You have to physically go to page 25 and then where on page 25? Third life, fifth life? You'll get confused. Please understand therefore the importance, criticality and difficulty of both writing a book or a paper and reading and understanding. If I am writing a paper, I am actually trying to represent this concept map into a sequential structure. When you are reading a paper, you are trying to recreate a concept map in your own mind. I hope that that concept map is similar to this concept map which I have in mind. Will I always succeed? Not necessary. That is the reason why writing a good book is extremely difficult and only recently books have started coming with a concept map of the book. You may think concept map is very difficult to draw. Dr. Sastra Kutney is going to actually discuss this because it affinity maps and so on later on. But here is a concrete story. Umpteen cases, umpteen examples where children were told a story and they were asked to prepare a concept map. Children who can't even write properly. But you will be amazed to know that most children came up with almost similar concept maps. That is because when they heard a story which was interesting to them, they could correlate to their own mental image of the world and could say this, this, this relates to this. They might write poor English, poor Hindi, whatever, but they could do that. Have we lost the ability to do that? We don't know, we have never tested it. None of you would have ever drawn concept map for anything. So I stopped this digression here, but it is extremely important that you understand the notion that the model of the knowledge in your mind, whether it is a research topic or problems or whatever, whatever, is always in the form of some network. And its written articulation has to be necessarily sequential or at most esoteric. The ability to reconstruct the original concept map. In fact, I will not be surprised in about 10 years time if every research paper is not required or mandated to be accompanied by a concept map. So that people who can look at that concept map and then correlate different paragraphs of that research paper to each other so that they form a better model. This is a very important part of communication. The authors are trying to communicate something. They convert this into this, which you read, and you try to create something in your mind. How are you sure that that something is this same something? That is how there are misconceptions, that is how people interpret things differently because their model is alcohol. We have exhausted this class here, but I would like to remind you that this lecture, by the way, does not talk about concept maps. But this lecture talks about reading a paper. Let me just go through some sample thing. It will look a little hard to be able to locate it towards the end of the introduction or somewhere screen. But what I want you to do is look at the colours. I think you should be able to see at least that. Title, I am sure all of you found. It is what is being shown in yellow. Abstract. In fact, here it says it is the abstract. It is usually the very first paragraph. It is either there in different font or it will go back and forth. So she actually suggests that you circle the paragraph saying, this is the point this paragraph is talking about. Please note that you are actually trying to write down the blobs of a concept map effective. Although she never mentions that because that time concept maps were not to the fore of our own understanding. But you identify these important parts of that particular paper. So this is the after getting the feel. This is the next thing that you... Let me go directly to the section where she talks about timings. But you should also be able to find related work in the section on background on page one. So basically she is talking about different components, background, details, technicalities, etc. You are supposed to identify them in the paper. Again, not a very serious reading. But this is important that you identify components of that paper saying this is what that paper... What this really tells us is that what you as the reader of the paper have... So getting the big picture she has given a sort of suggestion that what research area subtopic that is title to abstract. What problem does the paper attempt to solve? What the related work is? What key contributions broadly? How does the paper solve the problem? These are the components of a research. I like this breakup because this is exactly how you should be presenting a paper or a seminar report of yours. Something very similar. Who has to identify. So it's exactly... You should go through the section and subsection headings and then look at the figures, diagrams, illustrations and so on. This is all you need to do at this pass and about what problem they have. I think that was much new in terms of... This is where she suggests that you should never read a paper alone. Should have a pair. So although that topic may not be of interest to you, but what that other person feels about it and what you feel about that. So if you read in a pair or a group, small group, it adds tremendous value to your own understanding. But you have to discuss. Don't just quietly sit in a class and listen to a lecture. You are actually talking, discussing and that is what is suggested. Because the teacher had some... You only want to get the big picture details. Paper that we've read so far. Write a two or three page review which contains a summary. We'll use a new presentation. It's of the paper and to summarize it. For example, let's say you're writing a literature, a lot of papers that you will use for it. And by the way, you may not know what it is. If it... No, I may say. Anyway, I'll close it because we are exceeding our time.


Have any concerns about the white paper we could discuss those and then Tracy I think you've got an update on the where we are with getting maintainers for the training and education working group But I don't think we're gonna get to either of those votes and so I would suggest we just start and Have a brief discussion Or a long one as the case may be but I think it'll be brief on the white paper Art I think you know as I said in my note. I think you guys did a great job. I just had minor Suggestion that we add Project quilt since it was approved To the to the list of projects, I don't think we need to weave much more in but I think it would be a Good thing to to try and get something in I don't know if anybody's on from the quilt project Yeah, we I just sent out an email Chris responding to your email about five minutes ago We would love it if someone from quilts could write up a comparable Project description yeah, they can either add it themselves or we can add it for them So those just joined Sorry who just joined Silas just joined Hi there Sorry, I mixed up borrow and quilt for yeah, we need we need like Adrienne or Somebody to do that. So yeah hard if you could chase that one. I think it'd be good to just add that Yeah, it definitely would be so if we could get someone to contribute that that would be wonderful Yeah, if you can't grab Adrian in the next couple of days, let me know and and I'll you know I'll just just do something out of the proposal Okay, awesome. Any other comments concerns questions about the white paper Chris is whipping Sorry, I'd send out Something just now Sorry, it was so delayed Basically, I Think it's a great job. Like you said, it's very difficult to get Something comprehensive written about something as fast as the hyper ledger umbrella with all the projects the The comments that I had were one of them was about the introduction which basically says That the connection, you know the comparison to databases Although it may seem comfortable it's not It's not the way we should go because I think we should also explicitly mentioned the Antisidents of this idea With respect to Satoshi's paper. I know that the papers mentioned but further in the down as an example of a public blockchain Then also the development of that idea into these, you know into the split into the federated systems that That hyper ledger is incubating So that was one comment the other comment was on the use cases, which was basically It starts off with a debt or a loan use case, which I think is I mean Although it might be correct it it Projects the wrong idea That we should have a use case on issuance. I know that it's focused on the On something that is You know the use cases that have already been either discussed or in production or in POC on Each of those DLT's and then the third I third thing that I said was, you know, basically Obviously the these comments are coming too late So I would understand in the you know Indie to get the Paper out if we may not have You know many of these comments included because it may need more work more Feedback loops and so on The the idea was to somehow Inject inject something which says how this is going to be a living document and What, you know, what would be the path forward to the Future versions if at all getting released if that is even a thought That that was all thank you So so vipin to clarify something we are We are considering this a living document, right as we add projects and other things. They'll need to be added We don't think some of the sections will change too much at least hopefully bike Like for instance, I don't anticipate our design philosophy wildly changing the organization is kind of in a steadier place at this point Some of your other comments, we didn't want to list every use case. We just kind of wanted to list some illustrative ones You know, we figured that Things like asset issuance you can kind of infer from some of the the use cases we mentioned And kind of it was really difficult to get people to write up use cases. They were interested in this was probably the hardest part of the paper And one of the reasons why it took so long So if you've been following the list You'll see, you know, you know that we had to cut out kind of the highlighted feature section And that's mainly because we didn't have enough people Focusing on kind of use cases or applications Which is understandable, you know, maybe people don't want to make their use cases public But as far as the database comparison I kind of wanted to root I mean, I think blockchain is rooted in databases and I wanted to draw this You know kind of line I guess If you think we should Explicit our debt to Bitcoin more You know Bitcoin the idea I mean Because I mean, I think the main thing is the chain idea which Which is there present in every Implementation I have seen of the LTS even though some people Claim they are not change, you know, they're not blockchain like for example, Corda. They have a change Okay, if you think covering a single transaction, if you think there's a good way to implement this I mean, we're probably not so our next step is to send this to a technical writer to make it look pretty We're probably not gonna do that in the next like few days So if you think there's a good way to to say this I'd please feel free to like issue a poll request In the for the introduction If you think there's a there's a good way to say this and Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know the the points that I'm trying to make is one. Yes, I understand that use Guard that section out, you know the one where you had illustrative sort of highlights section which was Obviously Arnold's comment about that being only one to its identity, which But I mean identity, you know, I know that identity is a very important And foundational use case, but I see the imprint of the all over the paper, right? I mean, which which is because of their participation. I understand why I mean, I'm not I'm not a verse to that But then you need to bring some kind of a balance into the picture You know because it leads off the use cases lead off with the indie use case basically and all over the place There's in the I mean, you know by search for Indies that is because they participated drumming to you know, Nathan and everybody else. Yes.  I mean I completely understand that So, yeah for the introduction, I'll try but you know I'm not insisting on any of these obviously I cannot but but I'm just saying that You know, then if it is a living document, I would like to See how, you know that living document stuff is Embedded in the in the in the in the paper itself of future versions You know taking life I will I will try to at least try to word something about the The chain idea and then I'll send it to you Okay, thank you. Yeah, you can you can see whether it's, you know, whether it's completely off off the mark or whatever it is and Include it if you want to Yeah, that's all for me and I think it's you know, like I said, it's very difficult to come up with this A win vision By that same token, I mean this is you bring up you bring up a lot of people in Indie participated and that's true We also didn't have much Eroha Participation and that's kind of why that section is really light so if anyone from Eroha wants to edit that section and Buff it up in the next couple of days or week or so that would be wonderful Yeah, I get the feeling because of the of the difference in time zone is one of the main reasons Why? They do not participate. I mean even in the identity working group or the architecture working group You know We haven't seen their presence that much Okay Any other comments on the white paper, I have a comment Yeah dad dad Middleton Yes, sir Would you mind I just saw your PR request? It looks good. Can you please use item eyes for your lists or some other list formatting? Yeah, sure. Thanks. All right. That's my comment I That is as far as as Eroha keep in mind that that they're you know relatively