Blog posts

Doctoral Researchers Well-being: What’s New?

By Caroline Hargreaves, Senior Teaching Fellow, Graduate School, Imperial College London.

With the holiday now a memory, the Graduate School looks ahead to a new year of expanding and novel provision for all postgraduates. I wanted to pass on some recent findings about researcher well-being and reasons behind some of the developments, to help you with your choices.

This year I’ve had the good fortune to talk at the Higher Education Academy Surveys Conference and the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) Annual Conference about changes to Well-being in researchers between our 2009 and 2014 studies. A doctoral researcher at my talk at the SRHE mentioned how well our questions reflect doctoral concerns.

The PhD can be about more than scientific research

By Adam Persing.

I am Chief Data Scientist at MRB Partners, a Manhattan-based advertising/tech start-up, where I discover and develop machine learning algorithms that drive the firm’s products. I graduated from Imperial in 2014 with a PhD in computational statistics.

The main purpose of a PhD program is to teach a student how to conduct scientific research, but it also cultivates a skillset that can prepare a student for a career outside of academia. I have found that some of the most valuable elements of that skillset are:

  1. Communication,
  2. Market research, and
  3. Self-management.

In the following blog post, I will discuss each point in some detail, highlighting how the skill was developed during my PhD and how I apply the skill today in industry.

Three things I learned at MIT

by Matthieu Komorowski

During the fall and winter of 2016/2017 and as part of my PhD in the Department of Surgery and Cancer, I am visiting the Laboratory of Computational Physiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. Here are three things I learned from my visit at one the world’s top institutions.

First, “Humans were meant to dwell in dark airless places, illuminated by a flickering glow, interrupted periodically by the janitorial staff, checking for signs of life.” (formula from MIT Alumni Janet Cahn). In September, I moved to a flat in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with two PhD students in computer science.

A day lost?

By Janet De Wilde, Head of Postgraduate Professional Development, Graduate School, Imperial College London. 

Opportunities for Professional Development are snapped up by some, but for others time spent on professional development is perceived to be a “day lost” or “hours lost”. We witness this division of opinion in the Graduate School courses quite often. It is something we all have felt at some point, our mind is thinking about what we need to be getting on with. However, if we stay task focused, when would be the time to consider the big picture, develop our self-awareness, or challenge ourselves to improve if we are always busy?

Exciting times ahead!!

The Graduate School is pleased to welcome new students to Imperial College London and to welcome you back if you are returning. This is our new blog and we hope that you find it interesting. We would like to encourage you to contribute articles for the blog site so if you have something you would like to share with the postgraduate community, please do get in touch!

My name is Laura Lane and I am the Manager of the Graduate School and it is a great honour for me to be invited to write the first blog entry! I have been in my current role for coming up to four years now and I am really excited about the new programmes and events that the Graduate School is organising for the year ahead.