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New professionals frequently need to employ skills that are not always developed through course work, such as strategies for managing research or engaging community members in a field of study. To build a bridge between student and professional skill sets, the Z. Smith Reynolds Library and the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences Professional Development Advisory Committee are co-sponsoring a year-long professional development series-PROACT: Your Career Starts Now. PROACT sessions will bring graduate students, post-doctoral researchers and new faculty together to learn from speakers addressing a variety of topics that are important for attendees’ overall development as professionals. PROACT is a series of stand-alone sessions; you may attend one session, three sessions or all seven, depending on individual needs.

The inaugural PROACT session, Research Management Strategies, will be on Tuesday, September 21, at 4:30pm in the ZSR Library Graduate Student Lounge. Managing the research process can be an arduous task, especially when linked information facilitates rapid browsing and resource discovery, and files can be tagged, labeled, dropped and saved in multiple locations with mere clicks. Giz Womack, Instruction and Outreach Librarian, will share tips on how to effectively manage the research process, and preview tools that assist with gathering and organizing research materials.

On October 19, the second PROACT session will be led by Chris Turner, Assistant Professor in Neurobiology & Anatomy, will share the basics of Technical Writing Skills, a succinct art form of craft and clarity. The third PROACT event, Author Rights (Yours & Others’) will be led by Molly Keener, Scholarly Communication Librarian, on November 16, with discussion of the nuances of managing author rights in published scholarship.

Additional PROACT sessions will be held throughout the Spring 2011 semester, on topics from presentation skills to measuring impact via journal publications to ethical considerations of publishing practices. Read more and register for any or all PROACT sessions through the PDC.

Contact Molly Keener, Scholarly Communication Librarian, for more details: keenerm@wfu.edu or 758-5829.