Minutes of Postgraduate Staff-Student Liaison Committee Meeting
Friday 6th May 2005 at 12.30pm in room P521b
Present:
Students: Mark Ancliff, Emma Barney, Monihar Dillon, Andrew Edmonds, Ian
Hughes, John Thornby, Dominic Pearman, Amitesh Pratap, Caroline ShentonTaylor.
Staff: Diane Holland, David Leadley.
Careers Advisor: Jenny O’Leary.
Apologies:
Received from Malcolm Cooper and Pam Thomas.
Approval of minutes and matters arising
The minutes were approved as an accurate record of the last meeting.
David reported that the university’s Board of Graduate Studies has ruled out
the idea of taping vivas. The proposal to have an indepedent chairperson sit in
during viva examinations is still under discussion.
The careers day took place on the 17th of March and was deemed a success.
Jenny O’Leary from the careers department was present at the meeting to receive feedback and to discuss possible changes to next year’s provision. It was
argeed that the current one day session should be replaced with a series of
shorter, more targeted, sessions. In the autumn term there will be two morning
sessions for final year students (MScs and PhDs), the first one covering CV’s
and job searching and the second one covering interview techniques. These will
take place on the 26th October and the 30th November respectively. There
will also be two lunchtime presentations on job choices inside and outside of
academia. These will take place on the 18th and 19th of October. In the spring
term there will be a half-day session for second year PhD students, focussing on
career planning. It was noted that the Graduate School runs a series of skills
workshops which complement the services offered by the careers department.
Jenny agreed to send Mark a list of the most relevant workshops, for him to
distribute to all the postgrads.
Academic matters
(i)First Year Reports and Vivas
Several concerns were raised about the First Year Report process:
• There appeared to be inconsistencies in the amount of support students
received from their supervisor whilst preparing the report. This concerned
both the amount of time which students were able to allocate to the report
and also the amount of guidance given by supervisors during the report
writing process.
• There was confusion as to whether the word ‘limit’ was meant to be interpreted as a suggested word count or as an absolute upper limit. David
verified that the word ‘limit’ was there to serve as a rough guide to how
long the report should be. A discussion also took place about the lengths
of the key text critiques. It was agreed that the current length of approximately one page was okay. However, it was proposed that the suggested
word length of the reports should be exclusive of the critiques.
• The grading categories of ‘Good’, ‘Satisfactory’ and ‘Not Satisfactory’
were criticised as it was felt that these could be interpreted in different
ways by different supervisors. In response to this it was noted that in
addition to the supervisors mark all reports were independently graded
by a member of the Graduate Progress Committee. It was suggested that
the marking scheme could be improved by having more grading categories,
e.g. on a 1 to 5 scale, as the three categories currently used were judged
to be too broad.
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• A discussion took place as to whether the April deadline was too late in the
year for MSc students. This is a busy time of year for MSc students and
it was suggested that an earlier deadline around January might be more
appropriate given that the length of the MSc course is much shorter than
a PhD. An advantage of keeping the deadline in April is that students are
more likely to have had a chance to gather experimental/computational
data and hence be in better position to write the report. Mark agreed to
gather more feedback from MSc students about what they thought about
the timing of the report.
David agreed to update the postgraduate pages on the website to help address
some of the concerns raised above.
The 2nd Year poster session will be taking place on Tuesday 24th May. Concerns
were raised that the 5 minute talk slots were not long enough for students to give
a reasonable account of their research. David emphasised that the talks should
be considered as ‘abstracts’ or ‘trailers’ for the posters and hence 5 minutes was
a suitable length of time.
Safety issues
None arising.
Social events
A meal outing had taken place the week before the meeting and was deemed a
success.
Emma is organising a trip to Alton Towers on the 9th June.
The postgraduate seminars resumed at the start of term. There was a very good
turnout at the last seminar.
Date of next meeting
The next meeting will be on Friday 17th June, at 12.30pm. Mark is away on
this date and it was agreed that Andrew Edmonds will act as chairperson for
the meeting.
Any other business
The Einstein Conference, held at Warwick in April, was deemed to have been a
success.
Ian Hughes
Secretary
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