Mary Beth is the PGR Strategy Manager and leads the PGR Policy Team in Research and Innovation Services. This team looks after institutional PGR matters in areas such as university committees, policy / practice / regulations, strategy, scholarships and funding, and data and surveys.  Mary Beth has held this role for 10 years and in the previous 10 years held various roles within Glasgow supporting distance learning programmes, executive education, and alumni relations. She holds an MBA from Glasgow and hopes to finally complete her EdD at Glasgow this year.

Many of you will know about the PGR Survey, having participated in it or seen the results published in past years. For those who don’t, however, the annual PGR Survey is a chance for you to tell the university about your experience as a PGR: what is going well, what problems you might have faced, and what’s important to you. By pulling a report together with data from a number of sources related to PGRs, we can start to form a bigger picture of the PGR experience at UofG and see how to improve it. Some of these things may be seem rather removed from your day-to-day experiences as PGRs but they help us to build picture of your experience, identify gaps or areas of good practice, and ultimately raise everyone’s game. This blog post outlines the key points that arose from the 20/21 survey.

 1. We really, really missed each other. Being able to talk to colleagues face-to-face is incredibly important: those quick conversations where you can ask how to do something, questions about policies and processes, share experiences and approaches, or just have a chat with someone who understands your experiences as a research student. It’s clear from your responses that this support is key, both socially and professionally. While these results are not at all unexpected, having the survey data means that the university can foreground the importance of in-person interactions in future decisions.

2. Supervisors were the most important support during the pandemic as well as a key factor in a positive experience as a research student. Everyone was working incredibly hard during the pandemic to do as much as we could to support our students, so being able to tell supervisors how highly valued their support has been a real pleasure. Nothing is 100% and there were cases where supervisors were simply too busy, or where the relationship wasn’t working as well as it could.  We are very aware that while this relationship has a hugely positive effect on the student experience when things are going well, it can also have a really negative effect when it’s not.  You should never feel like you can’t raise an issue with a member of your supervisory team, the PG Convenor in their School or Institute, or with their Graduate School. There are of course issues that arise that are difficult to resolve and PGRs do always have the possibility of lodging a complaint with the University to activate a more formal process.

Remember that each College has dedicated Student Support Officers, whom you can contact with questions about anything from practicalities to wellbeing. You can find contact details here.

 3. The effect of the pandemic on PGRs has been highly variable.  Many students experienced challenging struggles personally, professionally, or both, so none of these observations underestimate those very real challenges. However, while many will have had their work delayed, many were able to keep things moving and plan to submit on time.  Some groups had experienced more disruption that others, but it seems likely that this relates to the absence of physical resources (e.g. labs, archives, artefacts, or research participants). PGRs also felt that broadly (around 70%) that they would ultimately submit on time, taking any extensions into account. 

 While this is an encouraging result, we don’t want to lose sight that the effects of the pandemic and the lockdowns are not now simply over for many PGRs.  I don’t know what next steps might emerge, but we will continue to review responses to this question in future surveys and listen to what we are being told by colleagues about what else may need to be done to support students in the future.

Other headlines

Overall satisfaction has dropped from 85% in 2019 to 78%. This isn’t unexpected, given the challenges of the past 18 months, however this is a key performance indicator for the University, and this is definitely lower than we’d like to see so we will watch this carefully over subsequent surveys. 

Communication is a persistent issue for students.  Many comments about this related to not being sure where to go for information or which messages to listen to when you might be receiving several on the same issue. This is a real challenge in a large organisation!  When in doubt, I suggest that students check with (in rough order):

·      their supervisor,

·      their PG Convenor (subject or School/Institute, as is most relevant),

·      their Graduate School,

·      or a University Service that relates to your query (e.g. the PGR or Researcher Development team in R&I, or other Student Services).

What happens next?

 The team in R&IS are creating a data set that can be shared more widely so that Schools and Institutes can take a closer look at their own data to pinpoint where local actions would be most effective. We want to make sure that conversations about the data from the survey is being reviewed at all levels and that these levels are all talking to each other. 

 During 21/22, we will re-run the survey. We expect that we might run two shorter surveys, asking fewer questions each time but keeping many of the current questions so that we can track how answers change over time. We are also taking more of an overview of what data we collect, how we use and act on it, and what feedback mechanisms exist.  A lot of work has gone into thinking about what data we already have, and while we don’t have data to answer all the questions we want to about the PGR experience, there is a lot of existing data that we need to find ways to understand and tap into.

 Survey responses will also feed into the annual Graduate School Review process where one Graduate School undergoes a quality assurance review each year. These reviews are reported to the Scottish Funding Council as part of the University’s quality assurance regime and we take the PGR experience to be a key factor in ‘quality’. We also write a ‘PGR report’ for the Student Experience Committee each year in which survey data features prominently. 

 For more information about PGR surveys in the University, please see the PGR team’s webpages: https://www.gla.ac.uk/research/ourresearchenvironment/prs/experience/#d.en.108099.