The Flowers Building Wine and Cheese Party was hosted on the 11th January by the CMBI Postgraduate Student Committee (CPG) and was funded by the Graduate School’s Research Community Fund. As well as washing away some post-holiday January blues this event provided an excellent opportunity for postgraduates both old and new to become fully engaged within the CMBI community. Around 40 postgraduates and postdoctoral researchers from the Departments of Medicine and Life Sciences attended and mingled in this informal setting.
The evening was guest hosted by James, an experienced wine expert previously of the Humble Grape wine bars, who guided us through comparisons of Old-World and New-World whites and reds and provided much highly appreciated wine trivia. The cheese was duly demolished long before the port appeared and we can report that the crowd favourite was a Swiss Mont d’Or “Winter-Cheese”.
The event definitely succeeded at its primary aim of providing research students the space and opportunity to integrate with peers across all floors and research groups as well as meet postgraduate researchers. We believe that events like this will continue encouraging cohort building and development of an integrated CMBI identity as research students will get to both expand their social circles and increase the diversity of research within them. We also hope that this event will help encourage attendance at our more regular CPG events including our monthly student-led research seminars, which provide an opportunity for students to practice presentations in an informal setting.
The CPG would like to thank the Graduate School once again for making the evening possible and we encourage others to make use of this excellent resource.