One-to-one research
15 hours, one-to-one
$6,000 for the complete 15-hour programme Review the agreement & enrol →The agreement is signed before any payment is taken.
Contracts & invoicing: mpa@hopeembark.org
- 15 × 60-minute one-to-one sessions, live on Zoom
- Your own research project — not a lecture course
- Written feedback on drafts between sessions
- Ends at a real submission, plus a mock peer review
- Hours valid for 12 months; refundable up to hour 8
How enrolment works
You see the full agreement before you pay — scope, fee, scheduling, refunds, and what we explicitly do not promise.
1
Read the agreement
The complete terms are published on the enrolment page. Nothing is hidden behind a deposit.
2
Sign electronically
Type your legal name to sign. An executed copy is emailed to you and to your representative at once.
3
Pay by card
The payment button unlocks only after signing. Stripe handles the card; we never see your card details.
4
Meet your mentor
mpa@hopeembark.org contacts you within 1–2 business days to confirm your mentor and book session 1.
The 15 hours in detail
Five phases, fifteen 60-minute sessions. The order adapts to your project; the destination does not — a manuscript you wrote, submitted to a real venue, with you ready for peer review.
Phase 1 · Finding a real question
Hours 1–31
Intake, goals, and target venue
Skills audit and research-experience baseline; what these 15 hours must produce (paper, thesis chapter, conference abstract); a shortlist of realistic target journals and conferences with their deadlines and scope.
2
Reading the literature like a researcher
Search strategy across Google Scholar, Scopus and arXiv; reference manager set up (Zotero); a 20-paper landscape map that separates settled results from open questions.
3
From gap to hypothesis
Turning an observed gap into one falsifiable research question; feasibility scoped against your actual time, data and compute; writing the one-sentence claim the whole paper will defend.
Phase 2 · Designing the study
Hours 4–64
Study design and methods
Choosing a design that can actually answer the question; variables, controls, baselines and comparators; naming the threats to validity before they become reviewer comments.
5
Data: acquisition and ethics
Public datasets versus your own collection; licences and data-use terms; IRB and ethics review where human subjects are involved; a data dictionary and provenance record you can cite in Methods.
6
Analysis plan and reproducible setup
Pre-specifying the analysis so results are not shopped for; a project skeleton with Git, pinned environment and a runnable notebook — the setup reviewers increasingly ask to see.
Phase 3 · Doing the research
Hours 7–107
Baseline and first results
Getting an end-to-end pipeline running on real data, however crude; reading your first output critically; debugging the gap between what you expected and what came out.
8
Core experiments and statistics
Running the experiments that test the hypothesis; effect sizes and uncertainty rather than bare p-values; correcting for multiple comparisons; understanding what your test actually assumes.
9
Robustness, ablations, negative results
Sensitivity checks and ablations that pre-empt “how do we know it isn’t X?”; how to report a negative or null result honestly — and why it can still be publishable.
10
Figures and tables that carry the argument
Designing each figure to make one point; axis, scale and colour choices that survive review; the reporting standards (CONSORT, PRISMA, venue checklists) your field expects.
Phase 4 · Writing the manuscript
Hours 11–1311
Paper architecture
Storyboarding the manuscript from the one-sentence claim; what belongs in each section and what does not; an outline detailed enough that drafting becomes filling in.
12
Drafting Methods and Results
Writing Methods someone else could actually replicate; presenting results without interpreting them; tense, voice and the reporting conventions of your target venue.
13
Introduction, Discussion, abstract, title
The four-move introduction; a discussion that states limitations before reviewers do; positioning against related work; an abstract and title that survive a 20-second editorial screen.
Phase 5 · Submission and peer review
Hours 14–1514
Submitting it
Final venue choice and fit check; formatting to the author guidelines; cover letter; ORCID, authorship and conflict-of-interest declarations; data and code availability statements; preprint strategy; walking the submission portal end to end.
15
Surviving peer review
A mock review of your own manuscript by your mentor; how to read reviewer reports without panic; writing a point-by-point response letter; deciding what to concede, what to defend, and when to resubmit elsewhere.
What you leave with
- A defined research question with a written feasibility assessment
- An annotated literature map of ~20 core papers
- A pre-specified analysis plan and a reproducible project repository
- A complete results set with figures and tables at submission quality
- A full manuscript drafted by you, reviewed section by section
- A submission package: formatted manuscript, cover letter, declarations
- A written mock peer review before you submit
What we do not promise
Your mentor teaches, guides and gives feedback — they do not write your paper, and your name is the one on it. Peer review, admissions and funding decisions are made independently by third parties, so no one can guarantee acceptance or publication. Anyone who guarantees you a publication is selling you something else.
Review the agreement & enrol →
Questions, invoicing, or a bank transfer instead of a card? Your sales representative is mpa@hopeembark.org.