Tag: christmas

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!

St. Mary’s Christmas Party 2018

by Inne Nauwelaers, PhD student at the National Heart and Lung Institute

On Wednesday, 12th of December 2018, students at St. Mary’s School of Medicine building got together for the second building-wide party. Thanks to the financial aid of the Graduate School, we were able to organise a Christmas party, bringing people together from every department at this campus: the School of Public Health, Virology, Respiratory medicine, Infectious Diseases and Paediatrics.

The reason we took the initiative and wanted to bring everyone together, is due to the fact that there is no communal space for people to gather and therefore interaction between departments is often limited.

This Christmas party brought students from different departments together and made it so much easier to start talking to each other. We decorated the room, putting up a ‘fire place’ and turned on some Christmas music. The relaxed atmosphere, along with the wine, beer, mince pies and snacks helped everyone to have fun and made interacting and talking to new people so much easier. New friendships and connections were formed as a result.

From 4pm onwards people showed up and had their first drink. Within half an hour, the entire room was full and people were eating and drinking, chatting to colleagues and talking to strangers. They enjoyed quiches, mini pork pies, sausages rolls, crisps and of course mince pies with a sip of bubbly, wine, beer or soft drinks. By 7pm, people were still chatting, but we had to start cleaning up. Rubbish was binned, glasses collected and washed, and the room was cleared of left overs. Several people were happy to help and spoke highly of this successful second Christmas party at St. Mary’s. Afterwards, several people moved to the pubs around to keep the evening going with their new friends. Merry Christmas!