The Graduate School has worked to open our provision to reach out to students and support them by implementing innovative Webinars and Retreats.

Webinars

We have a new highly engaging interactive webinar programme whereby students can live chat from anywhere in the world with tutors. It has improved accessibility for students on research placements, students with caring commitments, student juggling a clinical rota or industrial placements. Students have joined from Africa, India, European Cities and other destinations.

 “For someone who spends considerable part of my time in India, the webinar is an amazing experience. Not only was it remarkably simple to set up, the structure of the course and interactions made me feel as if I were back at the College. A truly fabulous confluence of technology and skilful pedagogy that leaves me wondering why more courses aren’t done this way in this connected era.”

 To review our webinar programme see: http://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/pg/graduate-school/professional-skills/doctoral/webinars/

Retreats

We have launched a range of retreats, the first was a writing retreat in 2015-16. This has now been extended in 2016-2017 to include Team and Communications Retreat and Research Impact and Influence retreat.

 To review our retreat programme see: http://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/pg/graduate-school/professional-skills/doctoral/retreat/

Thesis Writing Retreat:  for this retreat we work in collaboration with Imperial’s Centre for Academic English to deliver 1-1 support for students.

 “I think this course is a fantastic idea! It offered me great support at a time I really needed it. The writing up period can be stressful and being given customised advice is extremely valuable.”

Team and Communications Retreat: this retreat helps students to understand roles in teams, and working well together. It aims to increase their self-awareness and understanding of others.

 “It was a highly impactful and valuable session.”

 “It has definitely helped me identify my weaknesses in working within an interdisciplinary team. It's not possible nor feasible to change in one day, but now that I have become aware of the weaknesses through this course, I can work on changing and improving myself as a member of a team.”

Research Impact and Influence Retreat: this retreat helps students to demonstrate the impact and influence of their research.

 “This is a wonderful effort by the Graduate school. I am very much satisfied with the content, length and module leaders of the course. As a matter of fact, I shared the course details with my sponsor Commonwealth Scholarship Commission to introduce some additional training modules with same philosophy.”

 “Overall, the course is fun. We've done a lot of activities and challenges (with a quite small preparation time). The main value of this retreat are: (i) it teaches us how to communicate our research to different stakeholders with different backgrounds; and (ii) to think further about the advantages of our research which may be contribute to the society, economy, knowledge, and people”