This is the time of year where worrying about a research project coincides with worrying about Christmas present shopping, so why not bring the two together? A few years back (several HEIs ago) I took part in a project involving research students sending in short snippets of interesting research-related information, which they had discovered through their research journey so far. We had everything from interesting algorithms and beautiful code, to unveiling common misconceptions in scientific practice and bizarre facts about ancient mating rituals! Some PhD students offered advice and hot tips on resources they had found useful within their disciplines. All of these little bits of information were collected together, printed as a giant sheet of Christmas wrapping paper, which was then used to create giant ‘research’ Christmas presents. The gifts were placed all around campus and in local public cafes. This was a wonderful low-commitment and pressure-free way of allowing the PGR research community (including overseas and part-time students) to creatively share what they were discovering with the wider University and members of the public. There are so many interesting discoveries we make every day when we are reading, writing and “doing” research – but often we forget to share them. So why not get into the Christmas spirit of giving and make more of an effort to share those little golden nuggets of information with someone outside your field? Practice pitching your PhD and celebrate your discoveries by giving the gift of research this Christmas!
Neelam Wright is one month into her new post as a Researcher Development Training officer at Surrey. As well as having suffered a PhD many years ago, she is an internationally published active independent researcher. She has previously worked at different Universities across the league table in a variety of roles, including: teaching, mentoring, wellbeing, widening participation, careers, research funding and innovation, regulation and policy and research ethics. Having this opportunity to try out so many different hats has helped her gain an insight into how the different arms of the University connectively operate and how they can best be utilised to improve the research student and staff experience. Neelam is looking forward to using her knowledge to help Early Career researchers (new academics) and PhD students of all disciplines at Surrey: “My aim is to motivate and enable all of our researchers to get more out of their time here. If you do it right, it really is possible to engage in wider professional development and still produce a good quality research project at the end”. Neelam sits in the Doctoral College office (floor 5 of the library, so come and say hello!) and is currently helping her fantastic RDP teammates to expand and update their researcher training provision. She is available for one-to-ones (bookable via email: rdp@surrey.ac.uk) and will be taking over some of the delivery of RDP training and mentoring schemes for all PGRs and ECRs at the University from January. Neelam.wright@surrey.ac.uk
