Minutes of Postgraduate Staff-Student Liaison Committee Meeting
Friday 14th October 2005 at 12.30pm in room P523
Present:
Students: Mark Ancliff, Emma Barney, David Collins, Andy Edmonds, Paul
Guerry, Ian Hughes, Ingrid Oloff, Robin Orman, Ben Parkinson, Caroline ShentonTaylor, John Thornby, Nicola Wilson.
Staff: Malcolm Cooper, Diane Holland, David Leadley, Oleg Petrenko, Pam
Thomas.
Careers Advisor: Jenny O’Leary.
Apologies: Received from Amitesh Pratap.
Approval of minutes and matters arising
The minutes were approved as an accurate record of the last meeting.
Jenny O’Leary raised several careers related issues:
• The Graduate School has recently launched the ‘Graduate School Portal’,
which aims to act as a ‘one stop shop’ for all postgraduate needs. This
can be accessed at www2.warwick.ac.uk/academicoffice/postgrad/gsp/ .
• The Careers Service website has a new postgraduate section.
• A series of Physics Postgrad careers talks will take place during October
and November. On the 18th and 19th October there will be lunchtime
presentations, looking at careers inside and outside of academia. These
will take place at 12pm in room P520. On the 26th October there will
be a half day workshop on job searching and writing applications. On
the 30th November there will be another half day workshop, focussing on
interview skills.
Academic matters
The graduate school is proposing a 3 day intensive workshop for new PhD
students in the Sciences. The event would take place in week 11 and would
consolidate some of the existing one day workshops run by the graduate school.
A discussion took place about whether it was worth promoting this workshop
to research students in the Physics department. Concerns were expressed about
having the workshop in week 11, as this was judged to be too far into the
academic year for students to get maximum benefit from it. It was not clear
whether all students would be eligible for the workshop or just those funded by
UK research councils.
The committee was asked to comment on a proposed two day First Year Report
Writing workshop, organised by the Department of English as part of their
Academic Writing Programme. It was agreed that such a workshop would be
useful, however two days was judged to be too long and it was suggested that
the event could be condensed into one day.
The e-mail problems incurred last year by students who did their undergraduate
degree at Warwick have occured again this year, with students having e-mails
sent to their old account. Andy agreed to contact IT-services about this.
The format of the second year poster presentation was discussed again in order
to come to some agreement before the next staff meeting. The general consensus
of the committee was that the session of five minute talks should be scrapped.
The length of the talks was deemed to be too short and the increased number of
postgraduate students means that the overall length of the session is becoming
too long. It was agreed that second year students should give talks as part of the
colloquia series. There would be 4 talks per colloquium, each student speaking
for 15 minutes.
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Emma Barney reported the results of an informal survey about IT provision
within the department. Out of 57 people interviewed only 9 were on the ITservices tree. Various explanations were given as to why people had opted to
come off the tree. These included logging on problems and the slow performance
of computers running on the tree. There is also a problem with shared user
licenses, with programs such as Origin and Matlab not having enough licenses
to serve everyone on the tree. A discussion took place about the possibility
of the department buying a site license for these programs, which would cover
all users in the building. It was suggested that the department should become
more independent of IT-services, with system adminstration done internally.
One way this could be done would be for the department to employ a full-time
IT adminstrator. Concerns were raised about the cost of such an appointment.
Another way would be for each research group to have a designated IT person,
possibly a research student, who would deal with any IT related issues within
that group. It was noted that most groups have someone with sufficent IT
knowledge to be able to fill this role. Andy, Robin and Emma agreed to pass
on the views of the committee to the departmental IT contacts, Mark Hadley
and Mark Newton.
The Centre for Academic Practice has launched a new teaching certificate for
graduate students. The departmental examples class/demonstrator training can
be used towards the first part of the certificate.
Safety issues
Mark has reported the faults with the main entrance doors to Roger Buckle. It
was noted that people have still experienced problems opening these doors.
Social events
Emma reported that the Postgrad/Postdoc party had taken place on the 13th
October and was deemed to have been a success.
Date of next meeting
The next meeting will be held on the 18th November. Elections will take place
at this meeting.
Any other business
An international review panel will be visiting various physics departments in the
country as part of an assessment into the state of physics in the UK. Warwick
is one of the deparments that has been chosen and will be visited on the 1st
November. Postdocs and third year PhD students will be asked to present a
poster for this.
Ian Hughes
Secretary
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