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.

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.”

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.

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.

A day lost?

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?

Exciting times ahead!!

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.