Community

Belonging to a community is a vital part of your postgraduate journey. Being in contact with other postgraduates provides a mutual support network with other people who understand the specific challenges of postgraduate life. It’s also really important for making sure you don’t become isolated – which is often a particular challenge for research students.

Subject-based communities can support one another on key academic issues – such how to negotiate working in a lab team or discussing the latest developments in a given research field.

Communities that relate to particular sorts of experience can be crucial in finding other postgraduates who can support one another on issues as diverse as juggling research and parenthood, developing positive relationships with supervisors, and sharing hobbies to promote a positive work-life balance.

It’s generally important for postgraduates to form their own communities, as needs can change from year to year. But the Graduate School will help you get things up and running. So if you want to form a postgraduate community grouping, please get in touch with Jan at the Graduate School (jlb@aber.ac.uk) and talk to us about how we can help make it happen.

3 Minute Thesis Competition (3MT)

Postgraduate Research Conference

Graduate School Funding for Student-led Initiatives: Postgraduate Community Competition

The Graduate School invites applications from research students for funding to support student-led activities in 2023-24. This could include students (or groups of students) organising workshops, courses, conferences or attracting speakers to events.

We would particularly like to encourage proposed events taking place in the Penglais Postgraduate Centre.

We usually run two competitions: in December and March with a sum of up to £1,000 on each occasion granted to support the successful initiative(s).

Applications need not be more than one side of A4 and should include the following information:

• A brief description of the nature of the activity
• The actual or planned date and location of the activity
• The costs of the activity and the amount requested from the Postgraduate Community Competition
• The intended audience/participants – in particular whether the activity could or would be open to postgraduate research students from other departments.

Please submit applications to Dr Ian Archer, Skills Development Officer, Graduate School, 2.05 Cledwyn Building, email: ina@aber.ac.uk by the following deadline:

26th January 2024

Successful applicants will be asked to provide a short report after the funded activity has taken place.

List of previous activities

The Students' Union created the postgraduate network for postgrad students to meet other students on the same academic level as them.

The Early Career Researcher (ECR) Network aims to provide support and advice to people who are interested in research and consider themselves as early career researchers at Aberystwyth University.