Tag: GSU

The PG Leap Year Ball

On Saturday 29th February 2020, the Graduate Students’ Union (GSU) held its second annual Graduate Students’ ball, an event which aims to bring together postgraduate students from across each campus, each department and either research or taught Masters’ or PhD courses for a night of fun, and relaxed socialising. The Leap Year Ball was held at the Under the Bridge venue in Fulham and was a roaring success for both the GSU organising committee and attendees alike.

The first of these GSU Postgraduate Balls’ ran last year and was well-received, with just under three-hundred students attending. This year, the GSU team were more ambitious. “The challenge with events aimed at all postgraduate students is how to get the word out. Since we knew there would be students who attended last year who would be interested in coming again this year, we wanted to ensure we could facilitate them and even more students” said GSU Activities and Events Rep, Michaela Joyce. “We were fortunate enough to be able to secure a larger venue than last year, with a capacity of just under five-hundred.”

With a larger venue to fill and pressure to top the previous event, the GSU team were in for a challenge bigger than delivering Brexit on time! However, when early-bird tickets sold out within the first hour, the team knew the demand they had hoped for was there. “All the tickets sold out weeks before the event was held, we had emails from lots of people looking for spare tickets in the run-up to the event” said Hannah Jones, from the GSU organising committee.

Anticipation was growing more quickly than the fame of Joe Exotic. The event promised a live band, DJ, a buffet dinner with two different cuisines, a free Pick ‘n Mix stand and a digital photo-printing mirror all inside one of London’s leading party venues in the grounds of the Chelsea football stadium.

So did the event deliver? “The event was really great fun and a good opportunity to meet others from around the College in an informal setting.” said Masters’ student and attendee Laurence Blackhurst “I particularly enjoyed the Pick and Mix stand.”

Mohit Devgan, GSU President said of the event “It was great to see students from all around College having a great time. I’m proud of my team and of the fact that we managed to provide such a great event for so many students.

This event was fortunate enough to receive funding from both Imperial College Faculties and the Graduate School.

Connect to Succeed

As we get closer and closer to graduation, we look forward to taking a step into the real world and work either for corporations or starting our own venture in order to reach our potential. Judging by the society we live in, connections have a great impact on our future. Events managed and produced by the GSU give such opportunities to students, allowing them to expand their horizons. One such event was the GSU connect 2019 initiative.

The event offered students the opportunity to enjoy the cross disciplinary collaboration with other students, allowing for students to benefit from different skills and expertise. The event saw 60 students from diverse backgrounds, participating in the competition. Though GSU Connect has traditionally been a networking event, this year the committee had added a twist. Students had the opportunity to present a pitch to a panel of judges as well as the audience and the winning team to win £1,000 pounds in cash. The event ran for 2 days, one exclusively to allow students to connect with peers in a professional environment and the second to allow the teams to pitch their ideas to their selective audience and judges. The panel of judges included Mr. Anouar Adham Founder of Elite Crowdfunding Ltd., Elite Assets International and Elite IRP/ Assets and Wealth Management Expert, Ms. Anca Enica Co-founder of Legacy Venture, Mr. Matthieu Burnand Manager of Solar Energy startup, MBA at INSEAD, Mr. Robert Benson an Active investor in startup businesses, Founder of Arete Consulting and Mr. William Makant. In this year’s competition, two teams had the opportunity to take home £500 each by presenting an idea that could wow the panel and the audience. This year, the winning team had a unique idea, to develop a sustainable autonomous vertical farming system based on the aeroponics technology by using a technique in AI called Reinforcement Learning. This would allow scalability for vertical farming system, as the AI can learn and adapt in any given environment given enough training. The idea won both the award from the esteemed judges as well as the audience, proving to the world just how bright the minds of the future are.

Though next year’s event will focus solely on building connections and networking, we look forward to receiving both your feedback and any suggestions on improvement. The GSU thanks it’s participants for making this event as successful as it could have been and we look forward to seeing you all again at our future events. Keep an eye out on our social media channels to get updates and information on our exciting upcoming events.

We would like to thanks the Graduate School and the Research Community Fund for their financial support and for enabling this event to take place.

Welcome from the Graduate Students’ Union (GSU)

by Ute Thiermann, GSU President 2018/19

I am delighted to welcome you to Imperial College! Let me introduce you to the Graduate Students’ Union (GSU). We are the representative body defending your interests as a post-graduate student in major decisions taken by the College. Beyond that, we work towards building a thriving post-graduate community that spans faculties and where students effectively communicate in an interdisciplinary way. Our committee is comprised by motivated post-graduate students like yourself, who have been appointed in university-wide elections and volunteer to make your experience at Imperial as fulfilling and enjoyable as possible.

So, what are we up to for this coming year 2018/19? We are going to focus on three major areas of action:

  • Continue improving post-graduate well-being by increasing the quality of supervision and by creating strategies to tackle common mental health challenges in higher education.
  • Develop the GSU to become central to the post-graduate community by improving the two-way flow of information, between the GSU and you.
  • Organise exciting events around the topics of well-being, interdisciplinary research, and entrepreneurship.

As the GSU president, I would like to emphasise that Imperial College London is relying on its post-graduate students to maintain its position as a front-runner in world-class research and teaching. For us, the GSU, to be successful we need to receive as much of your input as possible. We want to work with you, for you!

Finally, I hope that you have a fantastic time here at Imperial and take advantage of the richness of opportunities that awaits you. If ever you have questions or ideas to share with us, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us and we are looking forward to seeing you at our events!

Ute Thiermann, GSU President 2018/19

gsu.president@imperial.ac.uk

IC Data Challenge – GSU President reflections

by Luke McCrone, Graduate Student Union President

In my December 2017 blog post, as I was setting out as GSU President, I referred to the importance of bringing together students from all faculties in a space which is collaborative. I am proud to announce that the recent genesis of the IC Data Challenge event has played a major part in fulfilling that vision…

Who was involved?

70 students, 7 companies and a lot of data made for an incredibly exciting hackathon event at the start of May 2018! We partnered with some great minds from the Imperial College Data Science Society to design and deliver this event. Companies involved included Deliveroo, DSTL, GSK, Fidessa, NewDay, Smarkets, Transport for London and Tableau. The event was also supported and endorsed by the Enterprise Lab, Graduate School and Business School.

All 7 companies submitted challenges and industry data for pre-assigned multidisciplinary teams of students to tackle. We had over 270 applications from students in all faculties and at all levels of study.

Students, industry and judge panel members applauding presentations

Event format

The event ran for 12 hours on Saturday 5th May and for the most part involved teams of students discussing their challenge over laptops under the supervision of industry members. The whole event culminated into a set of presentations from each participating team. The best technical team and best enterprise team were each awarded £500 cash prizes after being selected by an esteemed judge panel comprised of industry and academic members.

Best Technical: Smarkets team
Best Enterprise: Deliveroo team

Positives

The event was interesting for many reasons, firstly for the educational value it provided for all participants who were required to work with industry folk and fellow students from different technical backgrounds. Secondly, the unique marriage of academia and industry was an aspect highly commended by attendees from both sides!

My general opinion is that Imperial students should be exposed more to industry opportunities like this, not only for professional development reasons but also for exposure to different problem-solving approaches and for the development of commercial awareness in their fields. One student picked out this interaction with industry as the most prominent strength:

“I was assigned to one of the New Day teams – and their employees were professional, supportive and quite willing to nurture and coach us. This turned out to be the best feature of the event – the interaction with the New Day employees was top notch and that resulted in a day infused with valuable practical data science learning – simply priceless”

Lessons learnt

Despite most of the feedback being positive, we acknowledge the need to make improvements for next year. A few attendees mentioned how the event should be longer so that participants can get more out of the data with which they are provided. Equally, there seemed to be great difference between the format of different company challenges so more coordination and consistency between these needs to be achieved for next time.

Get involved in the next IC Data Challenge

I believe and hope that this will be the start of an annual event which builds in esteem and popularity year on year. The current team feel it has the potential to become a national event which involves students from other universities. Yet before deliberation, we need great people to take this forward; hence if you’re interested in being a part of the team that develops next year’s event then please either run for a GSU or ICDSS position or get in touch with us at gsu.president@imperial.ac.uk

GSU and ICDSS members behind the IC Data Challenge 2018

The Future of the Graduate Students’ Union – a Note From Your President

by Luke McCrone, GSU President

Getting Started…….

It’s been quite the ride so far. Since being elected into the role, it seems the Graduate Students’ Union has undergone quite the transformation, hopefully destined for something new and exciting. Thanks to the hard work of both th e outgoing and incoming committee, we’ve developed a new logo, promotional flyers, a website and more recently a strategy for our year ahead! And we are only getting started…

Yet I must be honest, it’s been quite the challenge. As a Constituent Union representing 7000 postgraduate students, our productivity has been limited by having only 3 members of our committee elected over the summer period: Paul and Alex, our two Vice Presidents, and I. Thank goodness, we now have the rest of our committee in post, ready to execute our plans for the year ahead.  We thank Imperial College Union and the Graduate School for their continued support in that respect.

Despite challenging circumstance, I’m realising more and more how much potential our postgraduate members truly have. My impression is that these are bright, talented individuals admitted from all corners of the globe, working day in day out to contribute to the ever-growing repository of knowledge at Imperial and beyond. The question which puzzles me is how we can truly bring together people with differing perspectives to make amazing things happen?

What does the GSU Stand For?

It was this very question which led me to believe what I felt the Graduate Students’ Union stands for. That for me was the breaking down of barriers, and it was the capture of this vision in a formal manner which ultimately led to the recent development of our strategy for the year ahead.

I’ve been at Imperial for 5 years now and I must be open and honest about how intense this place can be at times; that’s the inevitable reality of putting a population of driven, ambitious individuals under the same roof for a prolonged period! We may all have our own ambitions and plans, but there’s no excitement in hiding all that energy and creativity! I compel you to reflect on your life as a student so far and remember at which points in the past your best ideas have been sparked. For me, those moments have occurred in the presence of others, whether that’s a group of friends in a bar, or during a discussion with a supervisor guiding me through my work. There’s something quite special about collaboration, the merging of minds, the formation of ideas.

Get Involved and Meet Other Students

So how can we develop a culture which is more collaborative and perhaps a little different to institutions elsewhere? Well we must start by seeking comfort in leaving our disciplinary silos. We also need to recognise that difference is the root of innovation; whatever nationality, gender or culture, we all have something unique to offer, and it may just be that your offering is the missing piece to the jigsaw.

So, our efforts as GSU this year will be led by our aim to bring people together. We have an exciting series of events planned – one of which is centred around forming research connections, the other of which is related to enterprise and the final of which will entail multidisciplinary activity with industry members! I encourage you to watch that space and look out for our promotions…

Despite making some progress so far, we acknowledge that there is always room for growth and improvement as a GSU. We therefore invite you to share ideas and get in touch: contact us at gsu.president@imperial.ac.uk