Month: January 2020

Two minutes with… Marie Rider (Student Programme Leader – GTA Programme)

The Graduate School has appointed Student Programme Leaders in order to give doctoral students the opportunity to engage with our Professional Development Programme and shape its design and delivery.

In our new ‘Two Minutes with….’ series we will be introducing you to our current SPLs and finding out their thoughts so far on the role!

Name: Marie Rider

Department: Physics

Introduce your research:  I work in the condensed matter theory group, and I study topological nanophotonics, where we’re working to understand how light interacts with topological materials at the nanoscale.

Student Programme Leader: Graduate Teaching Assistant Programme

Why did you choose to apply for this particular SPL role?

GTAs are a crucial bridge between students and academics. We can have a massive impact on the student experience and the GTA programme provides vital training on how to approach the role. We’re the next generation of academics, and the approach to teaching and learning we develop now will stay with us throughout our careers so I really wanted to be part of the professional skills programme teaching those skills.

Three things you’ve found interesting: 

  1. The way the GTA role is defined varies massively between faculties and departments, so it’s an interesting challenge to make the programme relevant and useful for GTAs across college.
  2. GTAs have really different experiences of teaching and there’s as much to learn from each other as from the programme leads.
  3. Co-leading sessions for the GTA programme is a lot different from teaching a STEM subject!

Three things you’ve enjoyed most:

  1. Working with SPLs from other faculties.  Under ordinary circumstances we might never had met!
  2. Getting the opportunity to co-lead some of the programme sessions. Peer-run sessions are really fun and very different to the usual teaching I get to do
  3. Working with the programme leader, Richard. He’s so passionate and informed about what he does, so it’s been great to learn from him

What impact have you had on the programme?

We’ve been collating information from all departments across college on how they define their GTA roles and what skills they want their GTAs to have, so that we can tailor the content of the programme courses better

What advice would you give to other students thinking of applying for the SPL role in future?

Do it! Find a programme you’re passionate about and jump in.

Why do you think professional development training is important?

Being a scientist or engineer is about much more than our technical skills. The things you learn in professional development training help you grow as an academic and as a person.

Two minutes with… Daryl Ma (Student Programme Leader – GTA Programme)

The Graduate School has appointed Student Programme Leaders in order to give doctoral students the opportunity to engage with our Professional Development Programme and shape its design and delivery.

In our new ‘Two Minutes with….’ series we will be introducing you to our current SPLs and finding out their thoughts so far on the role!

Name: Daryl Ma

Department: Electrical Engineering

Introduce your research: Designing monolithic wireless electrochemical sensors for biomedical applications for blood or sweat monitoring.

Student Programme Leader: Graduate Teaching Assistant Programme

Why did you choose to apply for this particular SPL role?

I enjoy GTA work as I find teaching quite fun. I felt that applying for this role allowed me to learn more about other aspects of teaching.

Three things you’ve found interesting: 

  1. Speaking to other departments in the engineering faculty on how they run their GTA programmes.
  2. Understanding the different roles played by various GTAs in different departments.
  3. Conducting lectures for the GTA program.

Three things you’ve enjoyed most:

  1. I liked how different departments had their various viewpoints on how GTA work should be like.
  2. Talking about more in-depth teaching techniques applied, which probably bordered the field of psychology.
  3. Speaking to fellow GTAs and learning from their experiences.

What impact have you had on the programme?

We’ve managed to make some changes to the GTA program across departments by simply comparing them and explaining to these departments what the college standards are.

What advice would you give to other students thinking of applying for the SPL role in future?

Do it, it’s fun!

Why do you think professional development training is important?

It provides you with the soft skills required to perform your required administrative roles in whichever field your career path takes you.

CMBI Christmas-Themed Games Night

To celebrate the end of 2019, over 60 students, post-docs and PIs from the CMBI got together for a Christmas-themed games night organised by first year PhD students. This event was an opportunity for people from different departments and spread out throughout the Flowers building to socialise, as well as to allow the first year PhD students to get to know each other and the building.

Despite the students being thrown in the deep end, the event ran smoothly (mostly due to the invaluable help from the Flowers admin team and a last-minute dash to Waitrose).
Attendees played party games such as twister, beer pong and table tennis, as well as dancing to a music playlist best described as a Year 6 disco. There were also drinks, snacks and mince pies available, as well as several types of pizza and vegan pizza, which was kindly sponsored by the Graduate School.

The event was a success, with positive feedback from those who attended. It was also a great success for the first year PhD students, even if not all made it to the end of the night, as cleaning up the next day solidified new friendships!

We would like to acknowledge the Graduate school for kindly providing funds which made this event possible.

Our very merry meeting across the new-found divisions at South Kensington

Following the considerable restructure within the Department of Surgery and Cancer and new-found Department of Metabolism, Digestion and Reproduction, in a time where many aspects of PGR life have seemed up in the air, Simone and I (Kate) decided to unite everyone for a single evening.  The aim was to encourage new friendships, to promote collaborative opportunities and reinforce the sense of community across PGR students at South Kensington. For the first time, students, post-docs and supportive PI’s took to a cosy boutique hotel in Hammersmith to meet, eat and be merry!

The evening started with the classic Secret Santa, where our personal Santa Claus facilitated the exchange of gifts. This gave people the chance to find out more about colleagues they hadn’t potentially met before and represented the perfect opportunity to introduce the new PhD students to the Departments.

Following the many laughs at unconventional gifts, we moved to a close-by venue to begin our evening. The turnout was fantastic! A large number of students joined the event, not only new PhD students of the Divisions but also students based on other campuses who hadn’t yet felt integrated with the rest of the PGR community. One of the main aims for the event was to get students to meet each other. To overcome any nerves, we provided Christmas crackers along with food and encouraged students to pull them with people they hadn’t met before and break the ice using the jokes inside. 

Another aim of the event was to make sure students knew who they could go to with technical issues, as often people down the hall or across your desk may have solutions to your problems or have faced the same struggles. This large-scale event allowed students to get together and have these conversations. Additionally, colleagues from the National Phenome Centre, who are integrated with many students’ projects,  were invited to inform students of their capacity to support their work. I also finally got the opportunity to introduce myself to colleagues I have seen several times around the lab but felt it wasn’t the right time to spark up conversation, some of these colleagues working on similar instrumentation as myself, highlighting the importance of community building events such as this. With this in mind, we are incredibly grateful to the Imperial Graduate School and the Research community fund made available to us, without which this event would not have been possible.

The final stage of the night was to cut loose and really enjoy each other’s company. Dancing was heavily encouraged, with the manager of the venue giving us full reign of music control – balancing the evening between friendship, food and fun!

Feedback from attendees was overwhelmingly positive! New students have now formed relationships with many of the existing PGR students and they will develop these connections over the coming months to years of their PhD. The next step for all of us will be to support each other during these sometimes stressful and demanding years of our PhD. We are now surer than ever that despite working independently and across different campuses, we are a single community ready to support each other. 

PhD Business School Research Dinner

On the 4th of December, we, the Business School Research Graduates, shared research interests and a fun time with a Christmas dinner at Coco Momo. We are thankful to the Graduate School’s Research Community Fund to co-sponsor the event together with the Business School’s Student Staff Committee. It was a fantastic event with a large turnout across all departments and year groups.

The Imperial College Business School has a variety of PhD tracks including, amongst others, Management, Finance, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Economics, Marketing, and Operations. Consequently, although we pursue a large array of research topics as a PhD cohort, we often are focused on research within our respective departments. The Christmas dinner offered a great opportunity for us to socialise across departments and year groups. In preparation of the dinner, we asked all attending students to submit their research interests/topics/titles. We created a table, outlining everybody’s research topic and shared this table with everybody on the evening.

Across a 3-course menu and a glass of wine or soft-drink, we had ample opportunity to get to learn each other’s interests. Operations students for instance learnt about the importance of herd immunity and the impact of social primers on vaccination decisions from health economists students, while finance students explained to marketing students about new research directions in Asset Pricing focusing on exploiting information in the cross section rather than in the time series dimension. At the same time, older PhD students gave helpful tips and tricks to younger students.

The Christmas dinner was a great success across all dimensions – food, drinks, research and banters. We got to know not only our colleagues and their research interests, but also picked up new dimensions to our own research as well as new research ideas.

Thank you, Graduate School, for supporting this event!