In October 2019, I started working with the Post-Grad Community team to develop a focused offer that would respond better to the needs and wants of the PhD community. Here we are 8 months later, having experimented with different formats and types of content and learned so much about the challenges and amazing opportunities of working with such a diverse group. As I prepare to move on to my next adventure, I want to highlight some of the insights from developing this project.
The PhD community certainly is challenging to please! No two students fit in the same category, all have different interests, working patterns and preferences for activity types. Essentially, the PhD community is made up of 240 cohorts of 1! While there is a demand for more opportunities to connect, as was represented in the PRES and as I have heard from individual students themselves, when it comes down to finding time to engage in activities, things are more complicated. I am a culprit myself, in the most intense phases of writing my thesis or my confirmation document, I would barely leave my desk for days, let alone feel like I could afford to engage in social activities!
This meant one thing, if PhD students are going to come together and spare some of their precious time to engage with other students, everyone needs to be able to walk away from the event feeling not only that they have connected with other likeminded researchers, but also feel that the content has fed directly into their PhD work. This led to developing the “will my PhD change the world?” series of workshops designed to bring students together in a brainstorming workshop that would be an opportunity to directly discuss their own research question with a group of peers under the guidance of a senior academic in a given field.
The first session focused on Community Resilience and was led by Professor Kate Fletcher, drawing from her work on localism. The small group of students dissected and discussed each other’s questions, diving deep into the question of what it means to be a community and to be resilient.
The next session questioned the theme of Living with environmental change. As the leader of this session, David Cross suggested to flip the question and ask “will the world change my PhD?”, considering how the speed and expectations of research might need to be reconsidered in the context of a climate emergency.
And how clearly we are now seeing how the wold really is drastically changing the way we research! The COVID-19 crisis forced us to cancel all physical activities, so the next theme that would have been explored as a workshop was instead transformed into a written exploration of Lifelong health and wellbeing in the context of PhD studies fuelled with thoughts by Dr Sharon Cole.
The feedback from students engaging in these events was overwhelmingly positive, with some suggesting the workshops take place on a more regular basis. However what the promotion and organisation of these two workshops showed was that when pooling research students around a specific theme, the pool of interested candidates would grow considerably smaller, adding challenges of availabilities then reduced that pool further. So should networking events really be limited to PhD audiences? Following the same logic of making every opportunity count in the personal research journey of participants, the next approach that was tested was to provide a platform to present ongoing research to UAL and external audiences in safe and welcoming spaces.
One of the key focuses of this programme was to expand access to existing infrastructure, and in particular highlight research centres and institutes as hubs for PhD students to connect. The collaboration with the Social Design Institute on holding a research showcase during RNUAL Block 2 served exactly this purpose. This provided the opportunity for 4 PhD students to present their research and then further be included in a larger event hosted by the social design institute and involving the cabinet office PolicyLab.
The focus on creating opportunities to showcase research was maintained after social distancing rules were in place through a series of PhD webinars. The response to the call out was very positive and the online events were a great moment to draw a large audience towards ongoing research and give students a chance to practice their presenting skills whilst staying at home. The success of these sessions in terms of interest from PhD students and when looking at attendance numbers for each talk highlights how going online seemed to have lifted barriers to engaging with activities on campus.
Overall the project will have shown a clear enthusiasm for research related activities that specifically target PhD students and create more opportunities to meet peers, but challenges still remain strong when it comes to presence at physical events. While this specific project will be put on hold while the COVID-19 crisis goes on, Post-Grad Community has never been more present online, and the opportunities for PhD students to connect amongst themselves as well as with MA students and staff will support this thriving community.
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