The Art of Supervising a Dissertation/Thesis

(1-day training by Dr. Shazia Akhtar)

One day training on the “Art of supervising a dissertation/thesis” was held on Friday 11 Oct 2019 in the conference room for the faculty of Management Sciences as part of the Faculty Development Program, fall 2019. The Resource person was Dr. Shazia Akhtar who is Associate Professor/Program Manager at Szabist, Islamabad. She is an HEC approved Supervisor having experience of supervising 38 MS students and 1 PhD student with an Impact Factor publication. Moreover she is a corporate trainer for the past 15 years attached with OGDCL, NIBAF, Weatherford, INGO’s and many other organizations of repute.

The training comprised of 02 parts. In the first half the content comprised of Basic Facts, Role of supervisor and Ten Technical aspects which were general guidelines for supervising undergraduate / MBA student’s independent research/business research projects. The second part of the training was dedicated to supervision of MS/PhD students in which the content comprised of  stages of supervision  such as Stage One :Negotiating expectations Stage Two: Presenting an overview of the research process Stage Three :Getting serious Stage Four Let’s talk about organizational integrity Stage Five Precisely what’s going to be done, when and how? Stage Six How are we going to structure this behemoth? Stage Seven What?  They’ve actually got to present this stuff to other people? Stage Eight All hurdles jumped, now what? Stage Nine (Or… “I knew I could, I knew I could”[courtesy The Little Red Engine – paraphrased]) Stage Ten I thought I was done!! and Annotated Bibliography.

The training ended with a note of thanks from the HoD, Dr. Muhammad Asif Khan who appreciated and acknowledged the Resource Persons experience/ efforts to deliver such an intensive training and emphasized on the importance of such trainings to enable the faculty to enhance their skills of supervision and uplift the research standards of Szabist, Management Department.