With just over a month to go until the opening of our inaugural Festival of Postgraduate Research, we thought it was time to introduce the organising committee and offer an insight into the planning that takes place when putting on an event of this scale.
The committee was formed back in October 2016 and comprises our three Directors of Postgraduate Studies, three members of the Doctoral College admin team and around a dozen PhD students. We meet more or less monthly. The above photo was taken at our recent meeting in early April. Inevitably there are a couple of people each month who can’t attend so missing from the picture are Prof Darren Newbury, Patricia Soares, Adam Talbot, Omama Tariq, Heidi Von Kurthy and Helen Williamson (oh, and myself, Lorraine Slater, as I was taking the photo!). We’ve also had brilliant support from a couple of people who’ve had to step down due to other commitments: Helene Abiraad and Jenny Venton. We are enormously grateful to the students who volunteer their time and bring bags of enthusiasm to the table. We couldn’t – and wouldn’t want to – do it without them.
Read on to find out what one of our members, Willem Stander, has gained from being an organising-committee regular. And if you’re keen to check out the full schedule of the week’s events in May, stay tuned. We’re getting close!
Being on the Festival Committee
Willem Stander, 3rd year PhD student, School of Applied Social Science
Having previously been involved in organising the university’s 2016 research student conference, I was enthusiastic to join the committee again this year given the exciting changes outlined by the Doctoral College. Traditionally, past conferences have centered around oral and poster presentations by PhD students of their work to-date to other academics, and restricted solely to one campus. This year, given the festival format, the committee hopes to create an interactive, fun, and lively atmosphere through a variety of panels, exhibitions, and workshops spread across the university campuses.
Although I have greatly benefited from past opportunities to present my work to colleagues, I was personally interested in being able to have a hand in shaping events that would assist me in my current stage of study. As a final year student, I am looking at the write up of my thesis (akin to a trek up Mount Everest), a nervous breakdown or two (or three or four, let’s be honest), and life after my doctorate. As such, the inclusion of wellbeing sessions, and advice panels by early career researchers have been a welcome addition to the festival slate. Moreover, the research photo competition provides an interesting and creative way to think about our research in ways that easily (and imaginatively) translate our work to a wide range of audiences, and can be shared on several platforms. Time to put those Instagram and selfie skills to academic use, people!
To date, committee meetings have been a melting pot of ideas with much of our time devoted to tricky task of timetabling events. Alongside university staff, we have been able to share our ideas and draw on our own experiences in terms of what we thought would be practical, engaging, and needed by students at different stages of their project. It’s also been interesting to hear from colleagues from different fields about their work and facilities, and envisaging ways to share these across the schools (e.g. creative methods workshop, the Opposites Attract collaboration challenge, and a variety of lab tours). Personally, my experience being part of the committee proved to be invaluable in terms of co-organising a LGBTQ mental health conference with the University of Sussex. Having learned the intricacies of putting a conference together, I was able to draw on these skills to design a conference in my area of interest, and attract researchers whose work I have admired and drawn on in my own project.
We encourage all doctoral students to not only take part in the Festival of Postgraduate Research as an attendee or presenter, but also to consider joining the organising committee next time around. Often, our eyes are glued to our laptops as we try to churn out the word count in a caffeinated haze for that next deadline, and we feel that we have little available time for much else. We hope that you will use the festival as a resource to experiment with where you are and what you have, and that it will enable you to transform your project into a force to be reckoned with. We hope that you snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of the festival!