The Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES) closes on Monday 17 May 2021. The survey is your chance to tell us about your experience as a doctoral researcher.

Feedback is vital to the Doctoral College and the university. It lets us know how your programme of research is going and allows us to address any issues while also continuing to do what is valued.

In the Doctoral College, we use PRES results to plan future activities, provide support for our doctoral students and consider how best to allocate our resources. We really hope you’ll want to take this opportunity to get involved and help us continue to make improvements for you, your peers and for doctoral students in the future.

To complete the survey, look out for emails from us and colleagues across the university. These emails will contain your personalised link to the survey questionnaire (no log in required). Alternatively, you can:

Enter the survey now (log in required)

 

At Brighton, we usually participate in this national survey every two years. However, due to Covid disruptions, it has been three years since we last sought extensive feedback from our doctoral students. So we are particularly keen to hear your thoughts!

Since PRES 2018, we’ve introduced a range of initiatives. We’ve also forged strong links with Brighton Students’ Union, and we now work closely with our team of school PGR Reps. We feel we have a strong student voice to which we respond, and we want to ensure we are always listening to our doctoral research community.

Here’s a few of the things we’ve implemented since 2018:

• Introduced PGRCs in schools, creating a structure that facilitates a strong support and communications network for both students and supervisors.
• Increased wellbeing support and specialist counselling provision for doctoral students.
• Improved our communications with both students and supervisors through emails, our DocComms newsletter (on hold during Covid) and our regularly updated blog.
• Expanded and enhanced our postgraduate researcher development programme (PRDP).
• Partnered with the Brilliant Club, providing opportunities for teacher training and paid PhD tutor placements in state schools.
• Worked with the Careers Service to ensure careers advice addresses the needs of doctoral students more directly.

We are hoping that your feedback will help us assess whether these initiatives are meeting your needs and will highlight areas we need to continue working on.

The survey should take around 15 minutes to complete and is open until 17 May 2021. All those who complete the survey will be entered into a prize draw and could win of one of five £100 National Book Tokens.

To find out more about PRES 2021, please see the PRES FAQs or contact the Student Surveys teams at studentsurveys@brighton.ac.uk.

Please help us to help you by completing the survey by Monday 17 May. Thank you! We really do value your voice.