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My experience at the ‘Careers Talk with a Difference’

My name is Niamh Sayers and I’m a third year PhD student based at Hammersmith Hospital in the Department of Metabolism, Digestion and Reproduction, and also a Student Rep for this cohort. As I am nearing the end of my PhD (as are many of the friends I started with) I realised we may all be looking for things we want to do after our PhD, therefore I decided to organise this ‘Careers Talk with a Difference…’. We attend many scientific talks during our PhDs, from Work in Progress’ to conference seminars, but I realised we do not have access to many talks outside of the realms of science. So, I decided to organise a careers talk with a renowned public speaker to give some insight into other forms of communication besides scientific.

All postgraduate students were invited, across both the Hammersmith and White City campuses. The event was held in the IRDB seminar room. Drinks were provided upon arrival and pizza was ordered for the networking session after the talk had been given. The talk was held on Wednesday 4th March 2020.

I invited renowned public speaker Matt Black to talk at our University to the postgraduate students to give us an introduction into another way of thinking about the world and potentially help us in the next big steps of our career paths. Matt Black spoke about finding a path that is right for you and your motivations, and finding something that suits you, emphasising most importantly doing something that YOU choose you want to do. He used examples from his own personal career journey and spoke about Greta Thunberg as an inspiration for taking on big challenges.

There were many positive outcomes from the talk, one student even commented they were influenced to apply for a PhD position after Matt Black spoke about the idea that we choose the life we build and the direction we go in. I agree, in that he reminded me of the importance of choosing to do something I am passionate about, rather than following on down a path already trodden/laid out for me, based on what I “think” I should be doing. He also convinced me that anything is possible, if you choose the right mindset.

For me personally, I found Matt Black very engaging and enthusiastic, and I can see with his energy how he has gotten so far in the public speaking domain, which was excellent to witness, as well as learn from some the techniques he used to engage the audience. In addition to seeing his encapsulation of the audience, Matt gave me plenty to ponder over; my goals in life; what makes me happy and what incentivises me, so I left feeling thoughtful about my next steps after completing my PhD.

The aim of this event was to bring in a thought-provoking speaker with experience outside of science and to get students thinking about potential career moves after their postgraduate degree. Matt Black engaged with the audience and asked questions throughout, he also stayed behind and was approached to talk to by many groups of students in the networking event after. The feedback from the event was that many students left feeling thoughtful and encouraged, and there were many positive comments about the speaker and the event at large, with a highlight being one student even referencing this talk affirming her idea of wanting to apply for a PhD position next year.

All-in-all I am very happy with how the event turned out. Many postgraduate students attended, from a range of departments across the Hammersmith and White City campuses, and I will be looking for more speakers of a similar nature to invite to Imperial to aid tough decision-making by students about themselves and their future careers with another careers talk with a difference.

Many thanks to the Graduate School for funding this event and making it possible.

 

IEEE Research Symposium for PG Students at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London

Founded in October 2018, the IEEE Student Branch at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, was created with the motivation of “Developing collaboration between engineering students, researchers, academics, and industry by actively organising and promoting IEEE events”. The student branch strives to act as a common channel that various researchers, students and academics can use to share their research work, create new collaborations and discuss future directions. In doing so, we also hope to engender a more social atmosphere to the research scene in the college. This document will showcase the event that we have organised with your much appreciated support and will also detail intended future events with the hope that we will have your continued support moving on.

Our inaugral event, The IEEE Symposium, was organized at the EEE department on the evening of Wednesday 20th March 2019, and was a great success. The event introduced the student branch to the postgraduate community within the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department, as well as worked as a launch pad to introduce our planned flagship event, the IEEE Conference on Advances in Communications, Devices, and Systems – IEEE ACDS, which the student branch plan to organize later this year. The symposium featured talks from two highly distinguished senior IEEE members, Dr. Pete Harrod and Prof. Douglas J Paul. Dr. Harrod is currently the Director of Functional Safety at the CPU group at ARM and spoke on the challenges of developing IP for functional safety applications such as automated driving. Prof. Paul is an EPSRC Established Quantum Technology research Fellow at the University of Glasgow and spoke on the use of MEMS devices to detect gravity with high sensitivity and resolution. The talks were very engaging and we had a large turnout of over 30 people. Apart from aptly managing the logistics behind contacting the speakers and advertising the event, the student branch provided pizzas for all attendees to enjoy while listening to the talks.

Following the talks, we proceeded to a social at the Simmons Bar in Fulham (SW6 1LY). The student branch had organised a tab for everyone attending. The social had a turnout of about 20 people and was a fun night of some drinks, pool and retro video games. The social provided an opportunity for the researchers to socialise as well as discuss their research with their peers. The event ended successfully by 21:30, and feedback from participants was overwhelmingly positive, with many of them thanking the organising committee for making the effort to organise this event. Below are some pictures from the event. We feel such opportunities are a valuable part of postgraduate education and work towards our goal as a student branch. The organising committee is immensely grateful to the Graduate School’s Course Quality and Strategic Development Committee (CQSD) for providing generous financial support for this event.

In terms of future events, we aim to host more such symposiums with speakers from other fields of research along with different socials to accompany these events. We believe that having insights from speakers not only from other universities but also from industry is hugely beneficial to postgraduates at Imperial. Apart from these symposiums, our main goal for this year is the IEEE Conference on Communication, Devices and Systems (IEEE ACDS) conference, which we are currently planning and the details will be provided soon. For more information on any of these events, feel free to contact any of the committee members via email. The contact details can be found on our website https://edu.ieee.org/uk-imperial/.

Yours sincerely,
The IEEE Student Branch Committee at the Department of EEE, Imperial College London

“Dream Today, Do Tomorrow”: Reflections from a cross-cultural, climate change-themed summer in Beijing

By Shiladitya Ghosh, 2nd Year PhD Student, Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London

In the modern day, students (especially PhD students) tend to have a crippling fear of committing to future plans because – “what if I end up needing those extra days to finish this report or do repeats for my experiments?” As the 2018 edition of the Imperial – Tsinghua Global Fellows Programme (GFP) on Climate Change and Energy drew near, I too had misgivings. Who was going to write my reports for me?!

However, a change in setting and scenery helps to calm and settle the mind – and I experienced this upon landing in Beijing in the sweltering 36°C early morning sun. Meeting other participants reassured me that we would have an enjoyable and meaningful time one way or another, away from the otherwise-incessant worries of our degrees. In fact, it turns out that several of the Imperial students were still writing their ESA (first year assessment) reports! And I thought I had problems…

When it came down to it, those 5 days completely flew by. As we formed inter-university teams and took part in various tasks, the time spent on learning to effectively communicate while also attempting to work towards common goals took up more and more of our waking moments – even infringing upon mealtimes, as we sought the cooperation of our Tsinghua colleagues in helping us identify the various sumptuous dishes on offer. In return, we also invited our counterparts to join our evening board games crusades, watching the World Cup finals late at night (it came home a little too early…), and even yoga sessions!

Considering that the aims of the programme include facilitating cultural exchange and fostering collaboration, you realise how much of that takes place (and needs to take place) outside of the official programme just as described above. Just like in a professional collaboration, everyone involved will only get the most out of it if they first take the time to understand and connect with the other parties. The actual (technical) work of the collaborative project may only be half the job – the personal connection and groundwork is the other, bigger half!

Without revealing the specifics of the course, I can confirm that there were ample opportunities for mental stimulation whether in finding ways to collaboratively tackle specific issues pertaining to climate change or global energy demands, or through introspection to understand more about themselves, what their personal strengths are and what soft skills they still can develop in. Sure, maybe not every team completed every task, but it was never about that. A line from a poem penned and presented on the final day perhaps sums up both this programme and our own PhD experiences: “It’s about the journey, not the win.”

No single activity felt like a self-contained episode; every session was connected to past and future activities. We learnt about how we function as individuals and how we can best play a role in any team we may work together in. These are very important professional capabilities that I can recommend to any graduate student to consider inculcating in themselves – unsurprisingly perhaps the reason why a GFP course is allowed to fill up the Graduate School course requirements for Imperial students prior to their ESA/LSR/final submission.

Perhaps the most important takeaway from this programme for all of us as individual specialists in our own particular fields was that it opened our eyes and minds to the potential of every discipline to play a significant part in a concerted effort to tackle climate change. My accelerated project team (水星 or shuǐ xīng; Water from the Stars) and cultural exchange team (Imperial Dragons) consisted of members with backgrounds in fluid hydraulics, meteorology, energy storage, membrane technologies, art and systems design, signals monitoring, and cancerology (medicine).

I’d never have expected students in most of those areas to have much of a professional interest in, or even having a way to meaningfully contribute towards, solving the world’s biggest problem lying ahead – but by the end of the week, I had never been happier to have been so wrong in my life.

To everyone reading: thank you for your time reading this. For each person that makes it to this page, that’s one more person that has at least the slightest interest and curiosity about playing a part in tackling climate change. And from what I’ve learnt this summer – no matter what your academic background is, we want and need every single one of you onboard!

Imperial College squad!
Panel discussion
Boat trip
Finale!
Finals!