Commit · work · report
The thesis isn't writing itself.
WAGademy is a Working Accountability Group for HDR students, run in the Imaging, Sensing and Biomedical Engineering discipline at UQ: protected hours of focused work, alongside other people doing the same. Everything needed to run one — or to run it alone — is here.
The method, in three steps
- Commit. Say your goals out loud, and put them somewhere visible.
- Work. Three 50-minute pomodoros, phones away, alongside other people.
- Report. Did you hit it? What got in the way? No judgment — it's data.
That's the whole thing. It needs a room, a timer and three other people — and it works with no material at all. Why it works is worth five minutes if you're not yet convinced; Run your own is the run sheet if you are.
Two tools
Goal board
Write what you're doing in the next pomodoro — verb, deliverable, size — and drag it to Done when it is. Saved in your browser between sessions.
While you workSession timer
Three 50-minute blocks with real breaks and a report-back, or the classic 25-on/5-off rhythm. Built for the big screen; works offline.
Topics
Optional. A session runs fine without one, but a short themed discussion is what gets people through the door the first time — and it's what turns three hours of silence into something people look forward to.
Each is a twenty-to-thirty minute read plus something concrete to do. There's no order and no thread: take whichever problem is currently yours. The list grows as topics get written.
Writing momentum
Perfectionism, blank-page dread, and 'I'll just read one more paper'. Four tactics that restart a stalled draft, and one you can use in the next fifteen minutes.
Research skills · 60 min Hands-onReproducible research
The hands-on one. Work through it at a laptop and you'll finish with a real project on GitHub, a sane folder structure, and a README — about an hour, start to finish.
Research skills · 30 minSurviving peer review
What actually happens after you hit submit, how to read a decision letter without panicking, and the point-by-point response letter that gets papers accepted.
Research skills · 30 minTaming the literature
A four-step pipeline from scoping to capture, the difference between a review that catalogues and one that argues, and two honest criteria for when to stop reading.
Impact & profile · 40 minResearch impact
Impact means two different things and only one of them is easy to count. How to plan for the other one from the start, use metrics without embarrassing yourself, and keep the record that year-four you will otherwise spend a fortnight reconstructing.
Career & wellbeing · 30 minManaging up
Most supervision friction is unspoken, mismatched expectations. Here's how to make them explicit — with the agendas, feedback contracts and email templates to do it.