pgr hub – The Bristol Doctoral College Blog

PGR Hub: Pop-up activities throughout the summer

Posted on 23 May 201930 May 2019 by charlotte.spires

The Brambles — one of the venues for our pop-up summer events.

The PGR Hub is closing its doors for the summer in Senate House for necessary and crucial building works to take place across the building. Its new home will be on the second floor of Senate House while the first floor becomes a construction buffer zone for work to continue throughout the 2019/20 calendar on the new Campus Heart atrium.

But don’t worry – we understand that a physical space dedicated to cross-disciplinary research collaboration, and your general development and wellbeing, is an important part of being a PGR at Bristol. Also, we appreciate that research students don’t get whole summers off – research doesn’t always follow academic terms!

We’ll be helping run some summer pop-up activities across campus from June through September for you to meet and mingle with one another, take a time-out, or work on your researcher development. Whether it’s time to focus on writing your thesis or a paper, an opportunity to chat over coffee and cake, or a space to unwind in our calming crafternoons, there is something for everyone to enjoy.

See our schedule below – which will be regularly updated throughout the summer. All of our activities are open to all research students.

Schedule of PGR Hub pop-up activities

Activity	Date & Time	Location	Description
Spring-into-Summer Shindig	4-6pm , Thursday 30 May	PGR Hub, 1st floor Senate House	Meet and mingle with your wider research community over light refreshments and snacks – there will be music, plants for the keeping, and a chance to leave your thoughts about the PGR Hub’s first year
Writers’ Retreat	9am-5pm, Tuesday, 11 June	Room 2.26, 35 Berkeley Square	Supportive and structured days designed to help you focus on your word count and pick up some tips on distraction-free writing
Coffee & Cake Hour	11am-12pm Tuesday, 18 June	The Brambles	Take a break from your work, meet other PGRs, and enjoy some free sweet treats
Thesis Bootcamp: Veterans' Day	9am-5pm, Wednesday 19 June	TBC	A day for our Thesis Bootcamp attendees to come and check back-in on their progress and write in peace
Board Game Café	2-4pm, Thursday 4th July	The Brambles	Enjoy a classic like chess, Scrabble or Monopoly — or bring in your own game. It's your move.
Coffee & Cake Hour	11am-12pm, Tuesday 16 July	The Brambles	Take a break from your work, meet other PGRs, and enjoy some free sweet treats
Writers’ Retreat	9am-5pm, Friday 19 July	Helen Wodehouse Building, 35 Berkeley Square	Supportive and structured days designed to help you focus on your word count and pick up some tips on distraction-free writing
Writers’ Retreat	9am-5pm, Monday 5 August	TBC	Supportive and structured days designed to help you focus on your word count and pick up some tips on distraction-free writing
TA Talk Series: with Academic Staff Development	2-4pm, Wednesday 14 August	The Brambles	Are you a doctoral researcher who teaches? Come along to a relaxed informal talk for those balancing research and teaching.
Coffee & Cake Hour	11am-12pm, Tuesday 20 August	The Brambles	Take a break from your work, meet other PGRs, and enjoy some free sweet treats

Would you like to run an event or session yourself?

PGRs will have access to the Brambles space (in the Hawthorns) throughout the summer.

If you would like to run an event or activity for PGRs during the months of June – September, please get in touch with us with your idea and we endeavour to book you into the Brambles space.

Please note that we will be unable to offer bookings between 12 and 2pm, during which time the space is used as a relaxation lounge by all staff across the University.

When does the PGR Hub open again?

The PGR Hub opens its doors once again on 23rd September. To find out more about the changes taking place in Senate House and the Campus Heart programme, visit their website.

What we’ll miss about our Postgraduate Researcher Development Officer, Dr. Loriel Anderson

Posted on 17 April 201917 April 2019 by Doctoral College

Whether you’ve only recently started your degree, or you’ve been a PGR for a while, the chances are you’ve come across Loriel, our PGR Development Officer.

Originally a Classics PhD student, she started her career in Professional Services as an intern when the Bristol Doctoral College was first founded in October 2013 – making it a total of 5.5 years she has been working to make our University’s environment better for our postgraduate research students.

Today, the BDC team and wider PGR community bid farewell to Loriel as she returns with her family back to Canada, where she originally hails from. Just like the geese in winter, she is going back home – but not before we commemorate some of the initiatives she has left with us that have helped make our PGR community feel like a home for researchers.

She helped set up the PPD programme

The BDC’s Personal and Professional Development programme, commended by the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) as a shining example of good practice, is a curated catalogue of opportunities designed specifically with postgraduate researchers in mind.

Loriel was there at its conception, and has been the driving force behind the programme as it has grown and developed every year. While the programme extends out far beyond the seminars and courses offered centrally within the BDC, Loriel has played a huge role in working with colleagues across the University to ensure that the postgraduate research community knows what support is available to them in their personal and professional needs throughout their time at Bristol.

Setting up the Ventures Fund – a pot of money reserved for students to run development activities and initiatives they’d like to see offered – is part of one of the many amazing incredible gifts she has brought to the University’s PPD offering. Along with assistance from other colleagues in the BDC team, she even started running and delivering in-house workshops on Thesis Mapping and how to manage different stages of a research degree.

She is one of the brains behind Research without Borders

Some say that the Research without Borders festival is one of the PGR parties of the academic year – it’s both a showcase and a celebration of the amazing work that research students accomplish at the University.

The first Research without Borders festival was run by Loriel in the BDC’s early days, and while the festival itself has grown and evolved into its Colston Hall showcase and Watershed discussion series format of today, its aims have always remained the same: to give students the chance to communicate their work, train them about how to talk to different groups in effective ways, and to create space and opportunity for our researchers to meet people outside of their disciplines.

Loriel is the team member who described the festival as a chance for students to “raise their gaze” from their desk and look around at the wide, wonderful and wacky world of research happening all around us everyday. And this is a reminder and a gift we now celebrate annually!

She’s a constant champion for the PGR community – including making the PGR Hub happen!

A space dedicated to researcher development and wellbeing is something that felt like a faraway dream when Loriel first began with the BDC in 2013.

After years of setting up the PPD programme across various University rooms – from windowless holes in the basement of Wills Memorial Building to the beautiful views found on the 4th floor of the School of Education (she is still a font of knowledge about what rooms to avoid when booking meetings…!) – the PGR Hub became instated as part of the Campus Heart project.

Shaping the space, defining its mission, and being a champion for the significance of a PGR-specific space and the activities it can run, have been hallmarks of Loriel’s last year with us. She was even the ideas-person behind our Five Weeks of Wellbeing initiative.

She brings her job title to life

What is in a job title, you ask? In 2013, “researcher development” was still a phrase few in the world of academia understood. Why is researcher development important, and how is it different to other kinds of development?

Researcher development – as the BDC applies it in the world of postgraduate research – is about helping students at the beginning of their degree feel equipped and empowered to grow into effective researchers who feel able to apply the skills and experience they gain in a variety of interesting and engaging areas.

No one has brought this quite to life like Loriel: she has proven, as all the above have indicated, that growing into an “effective researcher” means more than just delivering a skills programme, or hosting one fun community event. It is about making sure the soil to plant ideas in is fertile, and that the seeds and plants are well-tended and watered. She has given us an entire garden that will continue to grow and flourish, because she has given it the attention and care that it needed to take root in the first place.

So – this isn’t goodbye, but a “thank you”. Thank you, Loriel. You will be missed, but you have given us a number of gifts that we can carry with us on our side of the pond!

7 gifts the PGR Hub gave us in 2018

Posted on 20 December 201831 December 2018 by Doctoral College

As the staff of the BDC reflect on the joys and tidings 2018 has given us and our wider PGR community, we can’t help but return to the one gift that has kept on giving: our brand-new PGR Hub space. It’s only been open since October, but it’s already had a huge (and positive) impact on Bristol’s PGRs.

Here are seven of our Hub highlights — and some ideas on how you can make the most of this new space in 2019.

1. Putting PGR personal and professional development front-and-centre

The University’s Personal and Professional Development (PPD) programme for PGRs is now based primarily in one central location, thanks to the establishment of the PGR Hub. Our research students can come along to one consistent space to find out what’s coming up in our schedule of over 100 free workshops, seminars and courses run around researcher development.

Since the Hub opening in October earlier this year, over 45 courses, workshops and groups in total have taken place in one of our dedicated training rooms. Highlights include brand new courses that focus on different stages of a research degree: ‘Getting going’, ‘Maintaining momentum’, and ‘Finishing up and forging ahead’ help you plan and manage your degree according to which stage you find yourself in. ‘Thesis Boot Camp’, a residential writing programme for those writing up, also took place over three days in November. Check out upcoming PPD courses through our online catalogue.

2. Not one – but two! – seasonal Hub Quizzes

The Hub isn’t just about training and development, though. Bringing together PGRs from different parts of the University to meet one another and have fun is a big part of the Hub’s mission. The BDC hosted two ‘Hub quizzes’ themed around Halloween and the winter festive season — opportunities for PGRs to take a break, tackle our trivia-tastic questions… and endure some truly terrible puns

As we enter 2019 and look ahead at our upcoming seasons — Valentine’s Day, the Easter break, maybe even an April Fool’s themed quiz — we’re asking our PGRs to volunteer themselves as host! Get in touch with us if you think you can outpun our punstoppable punchlines so far.

3. WriteFest

November saw researchers and research students alike join in with Academic Writing Month (#AcWriMo). The University joined in for WriteFest, a month dedicated to support around writing for academic purposes. Altogether, our PGRs who took part wrote a total of 349,229 over the course of 30 days — an astounding figure! A big part of how we achieved this was through hosting Thesis Boot Camp, Writers’ Retreats, and Drop-in writing days in the Hub.

Of course, WriteFest wasn’t just about hitting targets – but about developing healthy, professional writing habits. Check out our WriteFest roundup for our most important takeaways and tips. From January, we’ll be hosting regular drop-in writing retreats every Friday in the Hub.

4. Calming Crafternoons

One of our favourite activities going on in the PGR Hub is the ‘calming Crafternoon’ – an afternoon dedicated entirely to mindfulness activities such as knitting, colouring, jigsaw puzzling or sketching. We provide the supplies, and our PGRs supply themselves! Even if you don’t want to take part in a specific activity, there’s free tea and coffee on hand to help you relax and unwind.

Do you have an activity you’d like to bring, a skill you’d like to share, or an idea for supporting mindfulness? Get in touch with us and let’s make it happen!

5. The introduction of our TA Talk series

A huge part of supporting our PGR community is to support doctoral researchers who teach. The Hub is host to the newly established ‘TA Talks’ series, which consists of loosely-themed sessions designed around peer-networking, support resources and development opportunities around the University. The first two talks featured appearances from the Digital Education Office and the Bristol Doctoral College.

The next TA talk takes place on 22 January, and invites early career academics from the Bristol Institute for Learning and Teaching (BILT) to discuss how their own teaching experiences influenced their research and career pathways. Sign up via Eventbrite.

6. Sharing PGR experiences in working with industry

PGRs Sam Brooks and Robert Dibble shared their experiences on placements they undertook this summer as part of the National Productivity Investment Fund. PGRs interested in learning more about the benefits of placement opportunities were invited to hear them speak and ask questions over free pizza in the Hub. The value of getting established in industry settings are that they open employability doors beyond the world of academia. Placements broaden your skill set, complement your research, and provide experience in a professional setting.

Our next discussion about placements features a special guest from Aardman Animations to share her experiences of working in Creative Industries. Join us in the Hub on 22 January.

7. Welcoming new PhD scholars to Bristol’s PGR community

The Hub provided an ideal location to welcome to Bristol our new cohort of China Scholarship Council – University of Bristol (CSC-UoB) Joint PhD Scholars. Returning students were invited to share their experiences of Bristol both as a city and a research-intensive University, and new students were encouraged to share their hopes and ambitions for the next few years.

The Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Enterprise, Professor Nishan Canagarajah, welcomed the scholars with a heartfelt message about his own experiences as an international postgraduate scholar, and the importance of finding and building relationships and support systems within one’s wider research community.

Since this event, the PGR Hub has been a space dedicated to helping our PGRs build those relationships and establish those support systems for themselves and with one another.

Help us name your new PGR space

Posted on 30 August 20184 September 2018 by charlotte.spires

We’re excited to announce the opening of a new space this October that is dedicated solely to the postgraduate research community. This new physical space in the refurbished Senate House (as part of the Campus Heart project) will offer a programme of events and activities designed to support, develop and connect our 3,000-strong body of postgraduate researchers, regardless of your faculty, funding, part-time or distance learner status.

Acting as a hub for all research students, this new space will offer:

Personal and professional development training
Bookable spaces for small research groups and cross-disciplinary meet-ups
Social activities
A quiet space to escape from the hubbub of campus life
Wellbeing support and resources

And more – we’d love to hear your suggestions about how we can make this valuable for you.

#MakeThisYours

The new PGR hub is a space dedicated to you and informed by you. Have your say and tell us how we can #MakeThisYours.

We invite you to #MakeThisYours before the space even opens by submitting a possible name for our new hub. Are there any famous research alumni who have inspired your journey? Could Hub-McHubFace be a serious contender? Send us your suggestions on social media or via email, and you’ll be entered into a random prize draw for one of two £25 Amazon vouchers!

We’ll put our favourite submissions to the vote in our next BDC Bulletin, due to land in inboxes September 14th.