by Martin Prießner, PhD student in the Department of Chemistry
On Tuesday the 11th of December the first event of this year’s Cross-CDT event series took place. The Cross-CDT event series aims to strengthen the already established friendships and form new ones between CDT students of different disciplines across the different cohort years. By organising meetings and fun activities with an informal character, the participating students get the opportunity to exchange their PhD experiences and professional and private matters. This enables them to form long-lasting friendships which will hopefully surpass their PhD studies.
On this winter-like evening on the 11th of December a total of 18 CDT students from 4 different CDT programs across two cohort years gathered together in front of the library at Imperial College London. Since not everyone knew everyone from the group, we briefly introduced each other and spoke a bit about how we found out about this event. In these conversations some of us found out that through the well-connected network within the CDT programs, we had already quite a few friends in common. After everyone arrived, we started walking to the ice rink at the Natural History Museum and got ready to demonstrate our skills on the ice!
Since there were some participants from countries in which the climate is naturally too warm to form ice, it was a first-time experience for them. With some of the more ‘advanced’ skaters helping those less able, everyone finally managed to get comfortable on the ice and most of us gathered at the Christmas tree in the centre of the ice rink for a nice group picture.
After roughly one hour we finished ice skating and rewarded ourselves with a drink at the bar, where we continued to exchange our experiences of the CDT program and the opportunities afforded to us as part of this cohort, e.g. helping organise the festival of science, which some members of the group had done the year before.
Following the skating, some of the group decided to go to the Bio-Eng-Christmas party in the Royal School of Mines to continue the evening!
To summarise this first Cross-CDT event was a very successful gathering of CDT-PhD students across different CDT years. We had a great time ice skating, celebrating and exchanging our experience of the PhD so far.
Thank you to the Graduate School of Imperial College London, for the financial support to ensure this cohort building activity could take place.
