It's survey time again! - The Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES) 2009

The Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES) 2009 has been launched today, and I would like to encourage (beg, even!) you to complete it. As a postgraduate researcher at Queen Mary, your opinion of your experience here is very important, and any information you provide will help us to improve things for you during the rest of your time here, and for future students.

PRES is an online questionnaire and it should not take longer than 20 minutes for you to complete it. All data collected will be held anonymously and securely. Your results cannot be traced back to you in any way.

A high response rate is necessary to obtain robust results, so your participation is very important and your time is greatly appreciated. You may have completed this survey last year, but please take the time to fill it in again, so we can see what improvements have been made since then, and what areas still need work. After this year, PRES will not run again until 2011, so it is a good opportunity for you make your views known now!

The survey is available here until 30/04/09.

The survey consists of 5 pages and once you click ‘Continue’ you will not be able to come back to the previous page.

The higher response rate we get to this survey, the more accurate picture we can obtain of what things Queen Mary does well, and what needs improving, and that will lead to a better experience for all research students. If you have any questions, please let me know.

Thank you!

Postgraduate Research Experience Survey 2008 - Results

Some of you might remember filling in the Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES) sometime in April or May of last year. Maybe you've been wondering what happened to all the information that you provided, or maybe you just forgot about it immediately, but either way - the results have now been analysed, written up, presented at committee meetings, and a variety of changes and new initiatives are being put into place as a result of the comments you made.

A summary of the results, recommendations and actions taken can be downloaded here.

I apologise for the length of time it has taken to get this information to you, but as you will probably know my predecessor, Cara Owens, left QM soon after PRES 2008 ran and I wasn't appointed until the autumn, so there was a long delay before the results were analysed.

Despite that, I hope you can see that the information you gave was very useful to the college and the Graduate Schools, and has led to some significant changes being made. If you have any comments about anything in the report, or would like more detailed information about any of the results, please let me know.

PRES 2009 will be starting in March this year, and I will be sending more information out about that nearer the time. Last year's survey had a response rate of around 20%, but it would be great if we could get a much higher percentage this year and ensure that the views of all PhD students are being considered in decisions that are made about the college.