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!

Welcome to Queen Mary!

If you've just started your PhD at Queen Mary, then welcome to the University, and welcome to this blog! I hope you have a great few years here. If you're not a new student, then welcome to the new academic year - I hope you managed to get a bit of a break over the summer and are looking forward to getting back to your research!

For those of you who don't know me, I'm Jo, the Development Adviser for Research Students at QM. There's a bit more info. about me and my background in the side panel. I'll be using this blog to keep QM research students informed of events going on inside and outside the college that might be of interest to you, so please check in regularly or set up an RSS feed. You might also want to look at the QM Researchers' Careers blog (see the feed on the side panel).

Also on this blog is a calendar of workshops and courses run for PhD students by the Educational & Staff Development department. You can find more information about each event by clicking on it in the calendar. If you wish to book on any courses you can do so here.

So, that's probably enough for now. Please get in touch if you have any thoughts, comments, concerns or suggestions about anything to do with your experience at QM.