Other Issues Panel Discussion (50 mins)
MA and PhD Perspectives from University of Birmingham Students
In this 50-minute interactive panel discussion, 2 MA graduates and a current PhD student will share their perspectives and answer questions related to: being distance based graduate students. We will share our journeys to becoming students; along with tips, suggestions, and workarounds for successful learning and research during Covid. We will also discuss if attending graduate school is the right choice (hint: it's not for everyone and there's some good reasons for/against). We will also explain some of the actions we've taken to understand and further Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and opportunities for Open Scholarship. We welcome questions from attendees and look forward to creating a welcoming session with thought-provoking takeaways for attendees.
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Joanne McCuaig is a discourse analyst that uses the tools of corpus linguistics to investigate communication differences. Her PhD explores the usage of the psychological terms: abuse, trauma, depression and anxiety. Specifically, she is looking at how these words have been used by the U.S. news media, by U.K. politicians, and by users on Reddit. The aim of her research is to discover what, if any, similarities or differences there are in formal and public uses. This research will contribute to the growing discussion of information exchange and usage between expert opinions and other segments of society. Joanne McCuaig is Doctoral Researcher with the University of Birmingham, in the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics. She’s a part-time, distance student as she lives in Seoul, South Korea and is from Canada.
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Tom Jeffery is a Graduate from the University of Liverpool (BA) and more recently from Birmingham University (MA). His MA dissertation specialized on educational and cultural differences between Korean and non-Korean teachers, which was edited and later published in the English Language Teaching Journal (DOI:10.5539/elt.v15n1p53). His current research focuses on the differences between temporal prepositions in the English and Korean languages and effective methods and techniques that can be used to teach them. Tom Jeffery lives in Daegu, South Korea and is from the UK.
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Michael is a lecturer of English for Specific Purposes for biomedical students at a Japanese university whose PhD students come from 20 different countries. In addition to fostering cross-cultural understanding in the classroom and through social events, he employs corpus linguistics to help students write research articles with the 2800-entry Keywords of Biomedical Science. His moonshot project is the putatively complete Eponymous Adjective Word List. He has a BA in Black Studies from UC Santa Barbara, and is currently doing a distance learning MA in applied linguistics at University of Birmingham to help turn his projects into more scientific endeavors.