Tag: cohortbuildingfund

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.

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!

Lunchtime Yoga @ White City Campus

On the 22nd of May the first power yoga class for PG students took place at the Molecular Science Research Hub on the newly built White City Campus.

For the first Taster Session a small room was booked, because no one expected a huge demand. Instead nineteen people showed up to the first free yoga class of which quite a few did yoga for the first time!

Figure 1: Our first ever lesson had a great turnout for a tiny room.

At the beginning of the first yoga class the teacher asked everyone to introduce themselves and tell everyone what they are trying to get out of this class. Almost everyone was craving for 60 minutes a day during which they can forget about their stressful PhDs and relax their backs from sitting in front of a computer or standing at a lab bench all day. Our personal favorite answer was from a complete Newbie to yoga who said  “I want to like it, so that I want to come back next week!”

Our teacher, Barbara Durand, is a professional yoga teacher, usually teaching at the Lumi Power Yoga studio in Hammersmith. The Vinyasa flow type of yoga they teach @LumiPowerYoga is perfect for young adults. Most attendees were surprised of how dynamic this type of yoga is. A lot of people which hesitated joining at first saying ‘I’m not flexible enough for yoga’ overcame their fear and realised that it’s not about the others or being average, it’s about your own personal body and battle. Every posture in yoga has multiple options, so anyone can improve at whatever level they’re at. The teacher does a great job in incorporating this into the weekly practise, making it highly inclusive.

Figure 2: We enjoy sweating and stretching every Tuesday in the yoga side angle pose.

The number of participants has been continuously rising and we register around 25 sign-ups every week. This is also mirrored in the steadily growing number of members of our mailing list which is currently at 54. We even had to move to a new room for more space at Brickfields Hall around the corner. All postgraduate students based at White City Campus are welcome to join the free Yoga lessons and we even have a couple of staff members being regulars.

Figure 3: The IHUB on the new White City campus is the ideal location for a lunchtime Yoga session – with unlimited capacity!

Yoga has become an integral part of our weekly work routine. This one hour of lunchtime break a week has positively impacted our productivity and social coherence across hierarchies, different laboratories and research branches. We look forward to anyone joining us at any time. EVERY level is welcome.

Happy Yoga,

Julia & Léonie

 

Testimonials:

‘I’ve been to so many yoga classes before. They never actually explained how to transition from an upwards dog into a downward dog. It was so good.’

 “I was worried I wasn’t gonna get a sweat because everyone replied saying they wanted relaxation out of this class, but I’m so glad I did sweat. I was scared they would just make us lay down in Savasana for ages playing some old-fashioned Indian music, which doesn’t relax me at all. I enjoyed the relaxation today, it was the perfect length. Normally all I want to do is walk off, because it doesn’t work for me, but here it worked. I’m definitely going again next week.”

 “Highlight of my week.”

 “I know why I didn’t go to the gym this morning.” “Me too!”

 “It was quite fast paced compared to other yoga classes I had been to before. I really liked it. I got a sweat out of it. A little sweat, which I wanted, so it feels like exercise. The class went by really fast.”

 

For more information drop us a message: yogawhitecity@gmail.com

Or follow us on Instagram: @msrhyoga

Summer Derby Day Party

There are many pitfalls that must be navigated as you work towards earning a PhD: one of the biggest is isolation. By its very nature, a PhD requires you to be researching something new and unique and when you’re at your desk trying to work out why the data looks weird, because it always looks weird, it can be easy to forget you’re not alone. That’s why events like the PhD Summer Party are so important. Thanks to the generosity of the Graduate School and the Bioengineering Department, every year, we’re afforded the opportunity to relax, make new friends outside of the lab, and live the student dream of free food and drink. This year was no different.

After a solid week of rain, the heavens cleared on the last Thursday as if to bless the oncoming merriment of the evening. We’re fortunate in Bioengineering to have very talented staff who have joined together to form the Gastric Band and, with the help of some volunteers, they relocated and set up in on the 8th floor of the Blackett Building complete with terrace. After some, shall we say, efficient preparations, the room was ready for the party to begin promptly at 5:30pm. By 5:45, the food was gone; at least that’s how I remember it. It wasn’t long before the room was full of clusters of people chatting, their plates laden with delicious BBQ all being washed down with a selection of delicious drinks. The warm weather meant we could venture out on to the terrace and look over the city as the sun slowly set over the capital. With everyone fed and watered, the band took centre stage and the party began in earnest.

The band astounded with renditions with their covers of rock classics, like “Johnny Be Good”, to pop hits, like Cee-lo Green’s “Forget You”, and everything in between. Though reluctant at first, 6:30pm is a bit early to boogie, it wasn’t long before the dancefloor was established and all manner of shapes were being thrown. Each member of the band shone with spectacular solos but the mellifluous voices of Kemi Aofolaju and Melanie Albright really got people cheering. Even Professor Bull got on the stage and had us bopping along to “Hit the Road Jack”. If you ever get a chance, see the Gastric Band: I guarantee you will not regret it.

9pm came, and with it the end of our booking. The band packed up, the reps and volunteers cleaned up, and my colleagues grabbed their “one for the road” and made their way to the Union Bar to continue the festivities. It would be easy to see the Summer party as just a time to blow off some steam and a waste of money for various departments but I believe it plays a vital role in making the PhD experience just that bit easier and more enjoyable. Whether it’s new friendships that you help you expand your research and build your career or just a friendly face to say hi to by the coffee machine. Every year the party gives us the opportunity to hop over the pitfall of isolation all to the tune of Toto’s “Hold the Line”. If you ask me, that’s worth every penny.

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

Geotechnics Bowling

On the 29th of March 2019 we made our way to the nearby bowling place in Bayswater for a Geotechnics Section-bowling night. After a nice group walk through Hyde Park we all gathered at the bowling alley at 18:00. Thanks to the great turnout of 26 people, we took over five of the lanes and played two hours of bowling – some more competitively than others. A few people tried bowling for the first time in their life and ended up getting one strike after the other, so there were many great celebration dances to be seen. While waiting for our next turn and cheering our teammates on, there was a large selection of burgers and other finger foods for everyone to enjoy.

Since bowling in London is quite expensive, this event would not have taken place at all without the support from the Graduate School’s Research Community Fund. We are therefore very grateful that we got the chance to spend such an enjoyable evening together as a Section.

Mech Eng – Robotics Forum PhD Connect

by Eloise Matheson, PhD student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering

The first PhD networking event for robotics related researchers was held on Thursday 15th November 2018. Sponsored by the Imperial College Graduate School Research Community Fund and the supported by the Imperial College Robotics Forum (Network of Robotics), this event was aimed to connect PhD researchers across the college that face similar technical and research challenges! Robotics in general is a very multi-disciplinary topic, and with over 28 robotics labs spread across departments and faculties, this event was a great chance to bring people together. Over 50 people from 15 different labs registered for the event, with a turnout of around 40. It was a fantastic success, and the outputs of the afternoon have included ad hoc visits to other’s labs, the plan to form a mailing list between PhD/EngD researchers, future smaller social meetings and the hope to run the event annually.

The afternoon started with a short presentation by Prof. Ferdinando Rodriguez y Baena, the Speaker for the Robotics Forum, who highlighted the importance of creating links between our labs at all levels – including between PhDs and other researchers.

Keen to meet the other researchers in the audience, we then had a few minutes to introduce ourselves to someone we didn’t know – and following that, to introduce our new partner in a round circle to the rest of the group.

The group introduction helped break the ice, so that we could begin the main activity of the afternoon – intense speed meeting! We broke into pre-allocated smaller groups over three sessions each of 20 minutes, meaning that targeted discussions could take place. The first session grouped people from different labs together, and the topic encouraged them to talk about best practises from their labs. The second grouped people of similar research topics together – specifically covering Modelling and Simulation, Control, Mechanical Design, and Sensing and Electronics. The third and final group split us according to a more social demographic – with Post-Docs and later stage PhDs in one group, early PhDs in another, middle PhDs in the third and finally all the robotics female researchers together, so that they could discuss issues and exchange ideas pertinent to their experience.

To conclude a fantastic afternoon, we finished the event with food and drinks and a social networking opportunity. Thanks again to the Graduate School for enabling 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!

Workshop On Numerical methods in KomplexitY (WONKY)

Workshop On Numerical methods in KomplexitY (WONKY)
08.10.18 to 10.10.18
Amberley, South Downs Way

Our group of 13 doctoral students at the Centre for Complexity Science at Imperial College held a trip of three days in the National Park of the South Downs Way. We stayed in a bunkhouse in Amberley, where we carried out a little workshop on numerical methods and combined it with long strolls in the green countryside. We had a good time and plenty of discussions.

Some years ago, a few of us had the idea of organising a small workshop to share tips and tricks for numerical methods in our research. Specifically it was an opportunity to discuss methods with some practical value seldom discussed in seminars. The workshop idea lay simmering for some time until we got the funding from the Research Community Fund, we then decided to combine the workshop with a jaunt in the countryside where spent a good time together and welcomed new students to the group. We would like to thank the Graduate School for sponsoring the event and for enabling our group to complete this activity.

We discussed the following topics (see our brochure): • Project scaffolding • Managing code • Managing data • Statistical inferences • Machine learning methods • Does and don’ts of programming • Plotting • Using the Imperial Cluster • First approach to data analysis • Blockchain • Use of Profilers • Julia

And did the following excursions:

Day 1: We went on a loop starting at the bunkhouse, following the South Downs Way until the Rackham Banks and back.

Day 2: We walked by the side of the river Arun until we arrived to Arundel, where we walked around the centre, visited historical buildings and took the train back. It took 4 minutes by train what had taken us 3 hours to do on foot!

Day 3: We went to Amberley and then walked towards Bury until we reached the river, walked by the riverside until we found a bridge, walked a bit more between farms and closed the loop at the bunkhouse. On the way, we met a friendly group of cows, who were very eager to join us.

 

 

 

Women in Physics Go Ice Skating

Tuesday 4th of December saw 61 Physics Student go ice skating at the Natural History Museum. The event organised by the Women in Physics group and open to all genders was aimed at building a cohort of open-minded students promoting gender equality in STEM.

The event was a huge success! After Meeting in Blackett at 16:15, tickets were distributed and the group set off to the ice rink. Seasoned regulars provided tuition for the less confident, with everyone making huge progress during the hour. After some fun, some photos, and a few tumbles, the group headed upstairs to warm up, claim the free drink and share skating stories.

The Ice Skating was very popular, with lots of mingling between different cohorts, across years and research groups. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with 61 requests for a repeat again next year. Thank you to the Graduate School for funding the tickets, and to all the participants for making it such a fun evening!