I have been asked to take responsibility for organising seminars etc for our post-graduates and am wondering what is provided at your institution, what do you find the most useful and is there anything you would like more of (no straying from the subject:p)?

At them moment I have included,
Journal club (although I feel this needs a re-vamp as its been a bit dry in the past. What format do your journal clubs follow?)
Seminars from guest speakers
Seminars from PG's
Workshops - skills based

Any ideas/what works/what doesn't would be very welcome!!

thank you!:-)

sorry for the typos - still early!!

Hi Moomin,
We've got a postgrad group here which meets once a month, it has evolved a bit over the years as initially we got speakers in (usually other staff members in the department) to talk about things like writing a thesis, applying for jobs etc. Gradually it has become more student-focused and one of us gives a presentation on our work, or practices a conference paper, each month. It's a nice get together because the distance and part-time students often come in for it.

We have quite a range of things -this month we have someone in to do a session on speed reading, we've had sessions on master document production, endnote, structuring a thesis, and this Satuday there is a day long session on poster design, conference presentation and getting your work published

brilliant ideas! keep them coming!

At the university where I did my MA we had a work-in-progress seminar which was a PG only (and invited staff as appropriate) forum for people to present papers of about 20 mins or so, either for practice for conferences or just to sound out chapter ideas. I'm in Classics and there were also reading groups for Greek and Latin (which we also have bits of at the uni where I am for PhD) which addressed a text per term and broke it down for language practice and lit crit practice.

A friend of mine doing a PhD at another Uni sometimes runs a group which analyses data for practice (very hardcore qualitative methods).

It sounds amazing.

A

This sounds very similar to what we do in my research group. We have 2 weekly sessions- one with members of staff, etc, and one with the first year PhD students. People bring it in turns to bring data and then we just discuss it. This is probably something that needs to be arranged between people working together in research groups rather than at a departmental level though I guess. Hm.

Otherwise, all I can think of at my uni are the skills based workshops which the professional development team run. I have found most of them to be a bit of a let down.

I'm not being very helpful, sorry!

We do a reading group. Get together, read each others work, comment on it. Small select group so everyone gets a turn and there is no freeloading.

Writing, I mean. There is a reading group too, but this one is about sharing our writing
(Soz don't know how to edit on this forum)