A new academic year!

For any new research students reading this - Welcome to Queen Mary! And for everyone else, I hope you had a great summer whether you stayed here or headed off to more exotic locations!

The programme of Learning Institute workshops for the 2010-11 year is about to start. You should receive a wallplanner listing all the courses soon, and they can also be seen on the google calendar in the sidebar of this blog. This year we have made a bit of a change to the course booking system, to try and ensure that there are spaces on the workshops for people who want to attend. Booking is now open for courses up until Christmas, but for courses in Jan, Feb & March booking won't open until 13th December, and for courses from April - June booking won't open until 1st March 2011. On the booking site there will be a reminder of this, and an invitation to contact me if you have a very good reason for needing to book a course more than a few months in advance.

Throughout the year there will also be various events and competitions you might want to get involved with, both inside QM and outside. I will post information about those on this blog, and also on the Learning Institute PhD pages.

Please get in touch if you have any thoughts, comments, concerns or suggestions about anything to do with your experience at QM!

The Learning Institute

On 1st September 2010, Educational and Staff Development became known as The Learning Institute. This reflects the fact that we not only work with staff across the college, but also with postgraduate and undergraduate students too.

The new Learning Institute (LI) website describes all the services we offer, and also includes pages aimed at PhD students, with information about training opportunities, events, personal development planning and more.

In the near future we will be setting up an area of the site (the Learning Network) especially for research students, which will contain blogs and discussion forums on any topics you would like to talk about. This blog will be moving over to that site soon.

If you have some time, please take a look at the PhD pages on the LI site and let me know whether you think anything needs adding or changing (my contact details can be found on the LI site). I would like the pages to be a useful resource for research students, so any input would be gratefully received!

When the Learning Network is up and running, I will also be inviting research students to contribute to the blog, on any topics they feel are relevant, so if you have any ideas please let me know.