Institute of Health and Wellbeing Early Career Researchers' Blog
During the IHW away-day ’19, Rose-Marie Barbeau presented on research impact, with the aim to clear up any enduring myths and misconceptions. Rose-Marie is the Research Impact Manager at the University of Glasgow. The following are key messages I took from Rose-Marie’s presentation:
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Photo by Eric Bailey. © Jul 2014. Used with permission under the license of Creative Commons. Via Startup Stock Photos.
I’m a post-doc who has recently completed a PhD. Part of my job is to apply for funding applications for future research. This has brought an uneasy revelation; I need funding to continue doing the work I love, but I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing… Fortunately there’s plenty of useful advice out there for researchers learning how to make successful funding applications. You may also have a grant writing team that you can join at your institution. I’ve summarised some of the tips I’ve been given that took me by surprise or seemed to be particularly important. Continue Reading
Photo by Alexis Brown © April 13, 2016. Used with permission under the license of Creative Commons.
I often wondered if research based summer schools run at universities and other organisations were worth investing in as a PhD student. When I heard the European Academy of Nursing Science (EANS) run an annual summer school specifically for nursing researchers, I decided to see if the benefits of attending would outweigh the costs of participating. The 2016 EANS summer school was held at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg in Halle, Germany. It brings together nurses and midwives of many specialties from across Europe to develop and promote nursing science. The intensive programme focuses on complex interventions in health and runs numerous workshops and seminars by eminent nursing professors on different research methods used to evaluate nursing interventions. Continue Reading
IHAWKES is two!! In June the IHAWKES blog celebrated its second birthday. Since there were a few other important events holding our attention last month, we decided to postpone this special birthday edition until now. We are thrilled to be still going strong after two years. In this time, we have published nearly 70 posts and had over 13,000 views on our website. In addition to posts from our regular bloggers we have had numerous guest posts from academics both within IHW and further afield. We have also recently expanded to include early career researchers as well as postgraduates. To mark two years of IHAWKES, we’ve been asking our regular contributors how blogging has benefitted them. If you feel similarly inspired, please do get in touch!! Continue Reading
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Good writing is arguably the most important skill for an aspiring academic to develop. No matter how important your research question, how novel your methodology, how rigorous your approach to analysis, academics are ultimately judged on written work, be it an 80,000-word PhD thesis or a 8,000-word journal article contributing to REF. Continue Reading
To all you ladies out there who might be looking for some additional support and networking opportunities during your postgraduate studies – check out the British Federation of Women Graduates. It was established in 1907 to help women in all countries fulfill their potential by supporting women’s opportunities in education and public life and fostering local, national and international friendship, thereby improving the lives of women and girls across the world. BFWG specifically supports female students at universities across the United Kingdom by: Continue Reading
So you might think that PhD land and social media don’t have much in common but it’s safe to say that without utilising the benefits online, interactive platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn have to offer you might miss out on quite a lot during your postgraduate studies. Here are my top reasons to use social media right throughout the PhD process. Continue Reading
Photo by Dustin Lee ©. Unsplash. Used with permission.
As a doctoral student eager to make the most of my research experience, I am surprised that the Research Excellence Framework (REF) doesn’t really appear anywhere in the process of postgraduate student especially when undertaking a PhD. In the United Kingdom, REF is the process by which research from academic institutions is judged in terms of its quality and impact on society and importantly, it determines how much public money is allocated to higher education institutions that submit their research outputs to REF. The most recent REF results were published in 2014 and the process is currently under review, with the next iteration of REF expected around 2020 (http://www.ref.ac.uk/). REF is conducted by the four agencies responsible for funding higher education, which in Scotland, is the Scottish Funding Council (SFC). Its main aim is to ensure that “public investment in research produces evidence of the benefits of this investment” and it also “provides benchmarking information and establishes reputational yardsticks, for use within the higher education sector and for public information” (REF, 2011). Continue Reading
Photo by Sergey Zolkin ©. Unsplash. Used with permission.
By Olivia Kirtley:
Recently, I watched a superb TED talk by doyenne of Primetime TV, Shonda Rhimes. In the talk she discusses ‘the hum’; this sense of perpetual drive, passion and industriousness. She loves the hum, she is the hum. One day, the hum stops. She feels restless, exhausted, disconsolate and, in a sense, grieving for the loss of joy in her work. Unlike many episodes of Grey’s Anatomy however, this story has a happy ending. Shonda takes a breath, she plays with her children, she keeps putting one foot in front of the other, and one day, the hum returns. She had a dip, a temporary period of being lost in the wilderness, then once rested and restored, she returns to her path. Continue Reading
Photo by Aleksi Tappura ©. Unsplash. Used with permission.
By Olivia Kirtley:
At the risk of sounding as though I am already penning my memoirs less than a month after my viva, most of the moments of academic serendipity in my career so far have not been during supervision meetings or whilst writing papers, but instead over coffee, drinks, dinners, and more recently, also on Twitter. I would even go as far as to say that the most magical moments of academia-the knitting together pieces of complex puzzles, of meeting people whose ideas set one bubbling with excitement- don’t actually happen in the office. Continue Reading