Course overview
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Priya's Wednesday, two ways

8 lessons · 26 prompts

A day in the life of a PhD Student: what changes with these prompts.

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Priya, a third-year PhD student in environmental science.

Priya starts her Wednesday with a literature review on microplastics. She opens ChatGPT and asks it to find related terms and summarize three recent papers. In twenty minutes, she has a map of the main debates. She saves the rest of the morning for reading the full papers that matter most.

After lunch, Priya hits a coding error in R. She asks Claude to debug the code and suggest a statistical test for her data. Claude explains the error and gives her two options. Priya checks the logic, runs the test, and interprets the output with care.

In the late afternoon, Priya works on a paper revision. She asks Gemini to outline the discussion section and tighten a paragraph that feels clunky. Gemini offers a cleaner version, and Priya rewrites it in her own words. She keeps her scholarly voice.

Before dinner, Priya uses a prompt to plan a lesson for the undergrads she teaches. She asks for practice problems on climate data. With the time she saves, she goes for a run and calls her sister. She finishes work at six instead of nine.

Before

  • Endless literature searches
  • Stuck on code for hours
  • Writing feels like a slog
  • Teaching prep eats the evening

After this course

  • Literature mapped in an hour
  • Code debugged with clear steps
  • Writing flows with my voice
  • Evenings free for rest

What you'll learn

  • Literature Search: Use AI to find related terms, summarize papers, and map debates before you write your literature review.
  • Research Design: Use AI to refine research questions, draft protocols, and pressure-test your study plan before committing time and resources.
  • Data Analysis: Use AI to debug code, choose plausible statistical tests, and turn output into careful, verifiable interpretations.
  • Academic Writing: Use AI to outline papers, tighten prose, and respond to reviewer comments without losing your scholarly voice.
  • Conference Talks: Use AI to shape your conference abstract, build a clear talk, and prepare for tough questions.
  • Teaching Support: Use AI to plan lessons, create practice problems, and explain concepts clearly to students you teach or assist.
  • Grants and Fellowships: Use AI to align your project with funder goals, draft proposal sections, and tell a persuasive research story.
  • Collaboration: Use AI to turn meetings into actions, give better peer feedback, and manage communication around research.

How this course works

  1. 8 lessonsOne task of your job each, from literature search and synthesis to collaboration and research admin.
  2. Ready-to-paste promptsCopy, fill in the parts in {{brackets}}, paste into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini.
  3. Tick and completeTick the prompts you tried and mark each lesson complete.
  4. Get certifiedFinish and keep the prompts as your own library.