What we do with PGR Feedback

This guest post by Dr Richard Marshall, the Researcher Development Co-ordinator, is the third in our What We Do With PGR Feedback series. 

CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. Flickr, James Vaughan

I am sure many of you think there is a dusty vault somewhere, deep underneath the Crypt at Gilmorehill (the one with all the columns), where unread feedback forms are sent to await the doctoral research projects of historians as yet unborn.

Actually, all the forms submitted this semester are on a shelf on the top floor of No. 11, University Square, just behind my head as I type this notice.

We asked those participating in our courses last semester whether there were any other courses or training activities they would find useful. Depressingly, several respondents requested courses on Academic Writing or Public Engagement, which we already provide! (Don't forget to check out the list of our current courses). More in keeping with the spirit of the question, the most commonly requested new training opportunities concerned Media Strategy, Video Creation, and non-academic writing.

In response to your feedback, next semester we will accordingly be running:

Image- PhD Comics

1.       An introduction to Social Media. This is a redesigned course, covering the use of social media as a tool for disseminating research, creation of an academic ‘brand’, monitoring of effectiveness, and media strategies and ethics.

2.       An introduction to Short Film making. This is an entirely new course that will help researchers design visual content about their research, and create and edit short videos to embed in their profile pages or upload to YouTube.

3.       Public Engagement: writing for general audiences. This new workshop will encourage participants to consider ways to approach writing for communities outside of academia. 

4.       Video animation for presenting research. Another new workshop, in which participants can learn how to create video animations to maximise the impact of presentations.

5.       We have also redesigned our Three Minute Thesis training: learn how to condense your research into a three minute presentation, and then, if you like, enter our Three Minute Thesis competition (prizes include a £1000 travel grant!).

All these courses will shortly be available on MyCampus.

We’d also like to try a novel form of development activity: the mini-conference. This is a chance to hear from expert speakers, develop ideas, and network with interested parties over the course of an afternoon. As many respondents to our surveys also wanted more advanced training on Public Engagement, we wondered whether either of the following events would be of interest:

As we don’t want to sit in a hall full of empty chairs, vote now and let us know which event you’d want to attend if you saw it advertised next summer. Results will be announced in a few weeks.

Please feel free to send me your ideas for other activities or training courses as well – as part of Research and Innovation services, it’s our job to a) find out what you want, and b) come up with ways to supply it!