Category: Graduate School Staff

Year 1 PhD student ESA rehearsal & social

With the help of funding from the Graduate School, we put on a seminar and social event for first year PhD students based at the St Mary’s campus. Given that most first year PhD students have their early stage assessments due in June and July, we wanted to create an event where we could share our research and improve our presentation skills in a relaxed and friendly environment. Additionally, we hoped that the event would help us get to know each other and to develop a supportive network of peers throughout our PhDs.

The first part of the event started in the afternoon and consisted of a seminar hosted by Professor Wendy Barclay. All first year students and their supervisors were invited to attend, resulting in a small and friendly group of roughly 20 people. Each student gave a 10-minute talk followed by 5 minutes of questions. Topics ranging from Bioinformatics, diagnostic tools, mechanisms of viral infection and vaccines were covered, stimulating some interesting questions and discussions. Understandably, we were all nervous, however the talks were all fantastic and we found it a very positive experience. It helped everyone to gain confidence in their presenting abilities, which will undoubtedly help our ESAs.

The afternoon seminar was followed by a social event in the evening to which all staff and postgraduates at the campus were invited. The Graduate School funding helped to buy plenty of pizza from Dominos and a selection of drinks and nibbles, which went down well with everyone attending. Everybody mixed, met new people, and chatted around food and drinks; it was an excellent opportunity to meet other people who work within the building, which doesn’t happen often at St Mary’s.

Overall, the event was a big success. As first year PhD students, this was the first time we had all come together and properly talked to the people we had previously just occasionally passed by around the building. The presentations were a great opportunity to share our achievements so far and get a feel for our upcoming ESAs. It is also reassuring to know that we now have a base upon which to build friendships and the supportive relationships that will help us through the PhD experience together. Once the nerves of the presentations were over, it was great to relax and chat over pizza and beer. We are also glad that we extended the social event to all people at St Mary’s: the network of high-security corridors make it difficult to mix on a daily basis, and events like this are a great way to build collaborative relationships between the different sections and groups here.

Thanks to the Graduate School for providing the funding to make such an event possible.

Also, thanks to Wendy Barclay for coming up with the idea for the event and Magda Homa for helping with the organisation.

Goats, Concubines and Misery – the Ig Nobel Awards Tour Show 2017

The Graduate School was delighted to host the fantastic Ig Nobel Awards Tour Show on Friday 17 March for the twelfth consecutive year. Presented by the wonderful Marc Abrahams, co-founder of the Annals of Improbable Research, the Show seeks to make you laugh, then make you think with research that’s maybe good or bad, important or trivial, valuable or worthless.

Marc was joined on stage by several winners of the Ig Nobel Prize, who presented their research in a hilarious and fun-filled evening. This year, Marc was joined by the following prize winners:

Mathematics – Dr Elizabeth Oberzaucher: Mathematical Analysis of the Man who Fathered 888 Children)

Management – Raghavendra Rau: Some Business Leaders Acquire a Taste for Disasters that do not Affect Them Personally

Biology – Thomas Thwaites: Living as a Goat

Also on stage were the QI Elves, who gave dramatic readings from bizarre-seeming research studies, including, “On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit,” “From junior to senior Pinocchio: A cross-sectional lifespan investigation of deception”, and “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.”

Dr Elisabeth Oberzaucher of the University of Ulm, Germany, presented mathematical analysis of how Ismail Ibn Sharif, ruler of Morocco from 1672 to 1727, successfully fathered 888 children! Ismail had four wives and is said to have had up to 500 concubines, but even with more conservative parameters the numbers suggest he could have had fewer than 100. Elisabeth’s analysis focused on how many times a day Ismail would have had to have sex in order to sire so many children, with the resulting estimate being around once a day for thirty-two years. Sadly, the majority of Ismail’s children died shortly after his own death, as they fought amongst each other for the throne.

Professor Raghavendra Rau of the University of Cambridge presented analysis of how exposure to disasters in their early lives impacts CEOs’ likelihood to take risks. The results suggest that those who experienced disasters without extremely negative consequences were more likely to lead aggressive-behaving companies, whereas those who saw the negatives were likely to behave more conservatively. Who would have thought it!

Thomas Thwaites decided to take a holiday from the angst of being human and become a goat. To achieve this dream and don the identity of Goat Man, Thomas built a suit of limbs he could wear, and acquired a rumen to strap to his chest, in which he could deposit the Alpine grass he chewed. Whilst struggling to completely detach himself from his human prison, Thomas did succeed in bonding with the herd, even making a good friend in goat number 17!

The Show was rounded off with David Kilgour explaining with various charts why Britain’s Ministry of Defence is so, um, efficient. And with it, another fantastic Ig Nobel Awards Tour Show was brought to a close. It always promises to be an incredible evening, so please keep an eye out for the thirteenth consecutive Show in Spring 2018!

Evidencing Leadership and Management within a PhD

By Dr Paul Seldon

As researchers we are used to talking about our research to different audiences, explaining the ideas and findings. Often we are less able to see the wider value in our practices and how these can be translated to other roles and positions.

This became very relevant for me when having completed a PhD and several post-doctoral positions I wondered if I had relevant experience that I could evidence to gain full membership of the Chartered Management Institute (CMI). The challenge was to examine my academic progress through a leadership and management perspective. Looking through the activities of my PhD I found evidence in the five areas below.

  • Research vision – knowledge progression and impact, understanding of different research areas and importance of working across interdisciplinary boundaries,
  • Leading a research project – meeting deadlines and miles stones, delivering project deliverables and generating outputs. Upward trajectory in quality of research and innovation. Challenging, original and productive research. Outstanding independent research, with impact in the field. Problem solving and creativity, innovation and application
  • Development – Training of others, process, technique, subject expertise
  • Performance review – report generation, peer review publication
  • Finance – negotiation of quotes, use of ordering and invoicing systems, managing a research budget

The process of examining my research experience allowed me to identify and translate these into the leadership and management context. As a result of this I was approved for full membership of the CMI, this is and has been very useful for career progression.

Thinking about the examples above and other possible areas, what evidence could you provide of leadership and management. Other potential opportunities might include:

  • Leadership – Organisation of peer activities, Public engagement – Outreach? Innovation? Commercial awareness
  • External visibility – volunteering, job placements and internships – leading? Supporting others?
  • Development of excellence – Design and leading of Undergraduate research projects
  • Finance – Application for funding, success securing funding, for example Research Community Funding from the Graduate School
  • Self-development – undertaking Management and leadership training

Leadership and management may not be on your mind now, but in a few years your career progression may depend on providing evidence and taking the time to undertake appropriate activities is a worthwhile investment.

Doctoral Researchers Well-being: What’s New?

By Caroline Hargreaves, Senior Teaching Fellow, Graduate School, Imperial College London.

With the holiday now a memory, the Graduate School looks ahead to a new year of expanding and novel provision for all postgraduates. I wanted to pass on some recent findings about researcher well-being and reasons behind some of the developments, to help you with your choices.

This year I’ve had the good fortune to talk at the Higher Education Academy Surveys Conference and the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) Annual Conference about changes to Well-being in researchers between our 2009 and 2014 studies. A doctoral researcher at my talk at the SRHE mentioned how well our questions reflect doctoral concerns. I’ve also been in collaboration with authors, writing up a paper on our work.

Interest in well-being is increasing nationally and internationally, along with the realisation that reduced well-being can impact people physically and mentally, as well as organisations through altered work schedules. Well-being is used by international organisations such as the OECD (OECD 2016) and smaller organisations as a key indicator for policy formation and development.

As part of the worldwide research community your work will have many impacts from social to economic, so your well-being is important to us as not only as individuals but also on an international level as part of the knowledge and innovation led economy.  In 2009, the Graduate School carried out the first well-being study of PhD/MDRes/EngD researchers using Impact Analysis, a clinically approved methodology. We repeated it in 2014 to identify any changes. With support from academic departments and the Graduate Students Union and Students Union we achieved ~45% and 40% response rates in 2009 and 2014 respectively.

While well-being scores overall at Imperial continue to be satisfactory, well-being scores were worse compared to the 2009 study; well-being was found to be lower for women and for late stage doctoral researchers. Since the 2014 findings the Graduate School have been working with students, academics and support staff to see what changes we could make to work to make your experience more positive. I list some of these here:

  • The Cohort Building Programme was introduced so that you can gain our support and funding for activities that interest you and help your department and College build your Research Community
  • The World Class Research Supervision research and Task and Finish Groups have been informing and adapting provision on a College-wide basis
  • The Doctoral Student Coaching Programme introduced 1-1 support opportunities
  • The Writing Room and new Writing Retreats are for later stage researchers
  • New webinars enable all including those with external commitments to access our provision from home/work (there is also one on well-being devised for PhD Reps to help with their work)

Sign up to our provision follow the links or contact us at the Graduate School with any queries: http://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/pg/graduate-school/professional-skills/doctoral/ and for Master’s http://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/pg/graduate-school/professional-skills/masters/

e-mail: graduate.school@imperial.ac.uk

Follow the link on Graduate School Research including the 2012 study well-being reports for Staff and Students (2016 presentations will be uploaded later in the year): http://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/pg/graduate-school/about-us/student-experience/

Key College and Union contacts for well-being (list under “Here for you”): http://www.imperial.ac.uk/student-space/

If you have any questions regarding well-being or further suggestions for how we might improve wellbeing contact: caroline.hargreaves@imperial.ac.uk

A day lost?

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By Janet De Wilde, Head of Postgraduate Professional Development, Graduate School, Imperial College London. 

Opportunities for Professional Development are snapped up by some, but for others time spent on professional development is perceived to be a “day lost” or “hours lost”. We witness this division of opinion in the Graduate School courses quite often. It is something we all have felt at some point, our mind is thinking about what we need to be getting on with. However, if we stay task focused, when would be the time to consider the big picture, develop our self-awareness, or challenge ourselves to improve if we are always busy?

Personally, I have studied and worked in several places where there was no opportunity for professional development, no opportunity to step outside of the day-to-day work focus. There was just no occasion to think about what I was doing, how I was going about my work and my career – in fact there was no prospect of a supported process to develop my self-awareness.

Some people advocate that learning the hard way, by being thrown in at the deep-end, is the best way. However, one challenging experience of this for me was being recruited directly into a technical team at a major engineering firm. I instantly recognised that I had to sort out my approach, I had to learn fast to communicate well with technicians and managers in order to deliver my part of a project. If I didn’t I would sink very quickly and may not pass probation period. I wish I could have had some preparation to handle that transition.

The real gift from development courses is not ‘solutions to problems’ but the development of an ‘array of tools’ that provide you with methods to get around potential road blocks in your work or your relationships. You have the space to practice a skill or you can learn a new technique.

Companies see the benefit from taking top talent students and putting them on graduate schemes. They learn the technical knowledge for the company alongside great support for developing professional skills. The two are synchronised in development. Professional bodies also recognise these skills, they have a list of professional competencies that they expect each level to achieve. The graduate school has been working with these external organisations to align our provision with their recommendations. This has been so successful that the Royal Society of Chemistry has approved our courses so that students in that department can submit their attendance as evidence to gain Registered Scientist status, and for membership status.

So what may seem like a day lost can give you a life time of inspiration, recognition and direction. I would encourage all students to make the most of professional development at the College.

 

Exciting times ahead!!

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The Graduate School is pleased to welcome new students to Imperial College London and to welcome you back if you are returning. This is our new blog and we hope that you find it interesting. We would like to encourage you to contribute articles for the blog site so if you have something you would like to share with the postgraduate community, please do get in touch!

My name is Laura Lane and I am the Manager of the Graduate School and it is a great honour for me to be invited to write the first blog entry! I have been in my current role for coming up to four years now and I am really excited about the new programmes and events that the Graduate School is organising for the year ahead.

We are introducing a suite of four new residential retreats: Writing (for students who need to submit within 6 months), Global Impact, Building Global Teams and Communication and Global Entrepreneurs. Each retreat will take place at Cumberland Lodge, which is in Great Windsor Park, and will be a chance for you to meet other students from across College, develop professional skills with global emphasis and take a step back from your usual working environment to learn something new! Last year we piloted the Writing Retreat and feedback from students who attended was excellent, one remarked, “this is the best course that the Graduate School has ever run” – what a compliment! I do hope you will get the chance to participate in at least one of the retreats.dscf8371

The Graduate School introduced webinars for the first time last year in order to make our courses more accessible. We are aware that many of you are studying part time or have lots of commitments outside university and work which can sometimes make it difficult to attend the usual face-to-face workshops. The wonderful thing about webinars is that all you need is a PC with internet access so if you are at a placement, undertaking fieldwork, at work, or even abroad you can still engage with Graduate School courses. This year we are extending the suite of webinars to cover topics such as building your research profile, wellbeing, making an impact, plus a new webinar called, “Ask the Doctor”, which will provide opportunity for you to talk to alumni.

I would also like to take the opportunity to promote our cohort building programme which was shortlisted for a Times Higher Education Leadership and Management Award in 2015. 3mt_2016We offer two types of provision under this programme; firstly we can tailor our courses so that they are more specialised for subject areas and secondly, we have funds available to support students who wish to undertake cohort building activities. To give you some examples, we have previously funded student-led symposia, journal clubs, sporting networking activities, and even funded a trip to the Eden Project for a group of students. I would encourage you to have a look at our cohort building website for ideas and submit an application!

img_1501As well as continuing to host the IgNobels, 3 Minute Thesis and Live Chemistry Show we will also be launching a brand new summer research showcase in July which celebrates the amazing research that postgraduates students carry out and to celebrate your achievements – look out for more information about this in our regular e-newsletters!

Once again, I hope you find the blog interesting and please do get in touch if you would like to write an entry for us. Hopefully I will meet some of you at our courses and events next year!

Laura