Good news! I will start my first role within the mental health field the end of November as a counselor. This process took a lot longer than anticipated.

#postgraduate

If you have any job opportunity or know of a reliable one, please let me know.
I am hardworking, responsible, and always eager to learn.

Thank you 🙏

#JobSeeker #OpenToWork #Hiring #JobOpportunity #Hardworking #Responsible #Graduate #PostGraduate #ConstructionWork #ManufacturingJobs #OfficeWork #ResearchJobs #AnyJob #Dedicated

I recorded a welcome message for our new doctoral candidates last week. I said something about challenges to rigour and expertise and how they were the future…. I think I might have been pulling my punches somewhat…

#academia #academicchatter #graduatestudents #postgraduate #phd #science #ideology #vaccines #climatechange #autism

Early career researcher at #BSPS2025? Don't miss CPC-CG member Dr Jo Mhairi Hale from the School of Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews who will be hosting a session on career development later today:

🕛12:00-13:00
📍Great Hall 014
Packed lunches provided

Find out more about Jo's work: https://www.cpc.ac.uk/about_us/the_team/1607/Jo_Hale

#population #demography #careerdevelopment #geography #socialsciences #earlycareerresearcher #ECR #postgraduate

#CallforApplications 📣 The GHIL awards a number of #scholarships to #postgraduate students, Habilitanden and #postdocs at German universities to enable them to carry out research in Britain. Scholarships are generally awarded for a period of up to three months. 📜 1/3

📢 Applications open for Digital Art History – Online (2025/26 entry) at the University of St Andrews.
First UK Masters in Digital Art History, taught jointly by Art History & Computer Science. Fully online, flexible, interdisciplinary.

🗓️ Apply by 1 Sept 2025 (for Sept entry)
🎓 MLitt, PGDip, PGCert options
💡 St Leonards Scholarships available

#DigitalArtHistory #DigitalHumanities #Museums #CulturalHeritage #Postgraduate
https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/subjects/art-history/digital-art-history-online/

With a new #AcademicYear starting a pointer to a great resource aimed at #postgraduate research students, but likely useful for others as well:
https://www.dundee.ac.uk/projects/wellbeing-postgraduate-researcher-narratives

This #comic shares stories of postgraduate researchers to highlight how, where, and when to ask for support.

#AcademicChatter #DundeeUni #PGRSupport

Edit: Typo corrected

The Week Ahead

Another weekend is almost over so, after spending most of this afternoon in the garden, I’ve retreated indoors to look at my calendar for the forthcoming week. I find a plethora of Examination Board meetings, one (tomorrow) for our Masters students who did their presentations on Friday and two for undergraduates who took repeat examinations in August (one for Mathematical Physics and one for Engineering, as I happen to have been teaching Engineering Mathematics this year). The two undergraduate boards are both on Thursday. All three of these should be relatively brief, but you never know…

There is another meeting tomorrow, Monday, about organizing our computational physics teaching for the new academic year. The merger of theoretical and experimental physics has given us the chance to coordinate the different computational modules offered by the two previous departments, but we need to make sure the teaching rooms are big enough and the computers have the correct software, etc. Fortunately I’m not actually teaching Computational Physics again until Semester 2 but we have to get it sorted in time for other modules happening in Semester 1.

In between Monday and Thursday I have two whole days with no meetings and no grading to do. I might be able to get on with some research, or at least with writing up some research I’ve already done.

Friday is a big day for the Irish higher education system, in that it’s the day students get their Leaving Certificate results. This year the grade inflation introduced during the pandemic is supposed to begin to unwind, but none of us outside the examination system knows how this will be achieved or what the results will be. If I had to bet I’d say that the CAO points needed for most courses at Maynooth will go down substantially, partly because of the deflation mentioned previously but also because The Management has decided that the University has to recruit more and more students and will drop entry standards as low as it needs to in order to meet its targets.

I don’t know how many students we will end up with for Academic Year 2025/6 but I do know that I will have retired before most of them complete their course. I used to find it a bit scary thinking about retirement, but not any more.

#ComputationalPhyscs #LeavingCertificate #MaynoothUniversity #Physics #postgraduate #undergraduate

Presentation Day

Today was the day the last component of our MSc in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics here in Maynooth. The students handed in their dissertations on Monday and today they all gave presentations about their work. Listening to them all was very enjoyable, actually, as they were on a range of different topics, some purely mathematical, some statistical, and some more obviously physics. Moreover, they were all very good.

It also occurred to me during today’s presentations that we may make more use of such assessments to deal with the encroaching use of AI in project dissertations. One can get a good idea if someone has actually done and understood the work if they can present it in person and answer questions. That is, after all, the main reason we do viva voce examinations at PhD level.

Listening to talk after talk in a long session can be quite wearying – conferences are usually set up like that and they’re not often useful or interesting – but today’s session was fun. Not so much for the students I suppose, as there were a few signs of nerves. When all the talks were over the students trouped off en masse (presumably to the pub) as that was the end of their course. The staff remained behind to agree a set of marks and combine them with the other components of assessment, i.e. the marks for the dissertation. The examination board meets early next week, after which the final results will go forward to the University.

It was great to see the students all completing their course successfully, especially because it is (I think) such a demanding one. My only sadness is that we won’t see them until the conferring ceremonies in October. The Masters students have been regularly present in the Department throughout the whole year and I’ve had quite a lot of interest chats with them. I saw my own project student even more frequently, once a week for almost a year. We have to banish such thoughts now, though, as our thoughts turn to next year’s intake.

I don’t think any of the MSc students will read this – for all I know they’re still in the pub! – but in any case I’d like to say congratulations to them all and wish them all the very best for the future. They’ve earned it!

#Masters #MScTheoreticalPhysicsAndMathematics #postgraduate #Presentations

What is happening in American tertiary education?

#education #PostGraduate #Trumpistan #university

I don't know what it is, but I'm finding it quite difficult to focus on writing my thesis today...
#PostGraduate #WritingTrouble

As we wrap up #PopFest2025, we'd like to say thanks and farewell to the delegates who made it a fun and informative two days. We also thank the sponsors listed below.

The search is now on for next year's student organising committee - get in touch if you think that could be you...

#populationstudies #socialscience #demography #conference #population #phd #postgraduate #postgraduatenetwork

Still mourning a lost PhD nearly three decades on https://vivsacademicblog.wordpress.com/2025/07/05/still-mourning-a-lost-phd-nearly-three-decades-on/ #Academia #PhD #ChronicIllness #Postgraduate

Mireilla Bikanga Ada Master’s students' perceptions of final year project supervision: On-campus vs online #oSoTLSummer #SoTL #AcWri #highered #Vol1No1_21 #Postgraduate #supervision #dissertation #MasterStudents https://osotl.org/osotl/article/view/8/25

‼️ Extended deadlines for #PopFest2025

UK/Europe based? We need your papers and posters! Send a short abstract to popfest2025@gmail.com by 5pm BST on 13 June - bursaries are available too.

Registration to attend is also now open until 15 June.

Full info: http://cpc.ac.uk/activities/popfest_2025/

#postgraduate #population #postgraduateconference #demography #socialscience #ageing #mortality #geography #health

Edinburgh University has some Postgraduate Online Learning Open Days virtual sessions on today Thursday 22nd May.

https://app.geckoform.com/public/#/modern/21FO00qhsrvua100ij9gmgpctq

#Edinburgh #Postgraduate #MSc #EdinburghUniversity

Currently in a webinar about competency based admissions from the EDEPI project https://www.ntu.ac.uk/c/equity-in-doctoral-education-through-partnership-and-innovation - I share their starting point which is to select doctoral candidates based on potential (which I have found to be more controversial than I expected). #postgraduate #DoctoralEducation #PostgraduateResearch

https://unu.edu/merit/article/building-better-doctoral-support-systems-pandemic-lessons-future < Blog from my collaborators on how systemic resilience complements, supplements and enhances supervisor-researcher relationships. When times are hard the depth and breadth of the support systems is crucial. #Researchculture #Postgraduate #PhD #PostgraduteResearch #resilience #Bronfenbrenner

I haven’t had a journal article accepted for publication in six years. Until today, by Studies in Graduate and Postdoctoral Education…

Celbis, O.; van de Laar, M.; Windsor, W. L.; Papatsiba, V.; Ofosu-Ampong, K.; Kurawa, G.; Sadat Bole, A.; Ani-Ampsonah, Mary; Xu, Linlin

Towards an ecological systems approach to doctoral student resilience: qualitative evidence from the Covid-19 pandemic.

I’ll share the open access version when it’s ready, but here’s the abstract:

Purpose
This study contributes to the growing body of literature documenting responses to short- and long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on doctoral students. We examine support practices at different levels of the system in which doctoral students are embedded, drawing on Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems model to better understand how these contribute to doctoral students’ degree of resilience under stress.

Design
Using paired online interviews, we explore the experiences of 21 doctoral students from 7 universities across Europe, Africa and Asia.

Findings
We find that support of supervisors at the microsystem level was a pivotal mediating factor in explaining to what extent the negative impacts of the pandemic were experienced by the doctoral students in our sample. At the same time, factors at the systemic level, such as weak infrastructure for online education, and limited incentives for supervisors to engage in additional mentoring beyond supervision, affected the repertoire of actions available to students at lower levels of the support system. In less resourced settings where systemic constraints were felt particularly strongly, students had to self-facilitate sources of resilience, resorting to peer and external mentors’ support at the mesosystem level of their environment.

#covid19 #pandemic #research #HigherEducation #PhD #postgraduate #resilience #Bronfenbrenner


⏰ Hey #population #postgraduate students - only TWO WEEKS left to submit your abstracts on all things #demography, #migration, #health, #data and #population for #PopFest2025.

Head to the info page for more about the research strands and to submit:
https://www.cpc.ac.uk/activities/popfest_2025/

📑You can also apply for a bursary to attend #PopFest2025, designed to support accepted presenters facing barriers to participation.

📨 Submit your bursary application for consideration by 4 April at: https://southampton.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3lLg3lPQJDbm5sW