A look at what’s in store for you this year

Over the past few months, the Doctoral Academy has been busy planning ahead for the 2024/25 academic year. As firm believers that you cannot look forwards without first looking backwards, much of our time has been spent considering our achievements over the past 12 months and what we can do in 2024/25 to further enable our postgraduate research community to thrive.  

2023/24 recap

2023/24 was a productive period for the Doctoral Academy. This time last year, as we were approaching the start of the new academic year, I published a blog post detailing our goals for the year ahead. I am proud to say that we have accomplished the vast majority of them.  

2023/24 was also a year of growth, as evidenced by the fact that this year’s programme was our largest since 2019. In addition to awarding over £15,000 of funding to support postgraduate research students in undertaking development opportunities and organising activities, our programme included 302 sessions across 92 topics. It also generated 5700 bookings by 1135 different students. 

Find out more in our Annual Review video:

Closing the feedback loop

We also made it a top priority this year to gather the views of our customers and stakeholders, including the Students’ Union and academic schools, about our provision and services. We were also fortunate to have a postgraduate research student from the School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Gifty Andoh Appiah, join us on a paid research internship in May and June. Gifty undertook a critical, student-centric review of the Doctoral Academy’s offer from a diversity, equity and inclusion perspective, using focus groups and other qualitative techniques to benchmark our performance against funder expectations and to compile a list of recommendations. 

Looking ahead

Whilst we will be preparing a full response to this report over the coming months, we have already identified a number of changes and new services that we believe will enhance the postgraduate research student experience in 2024/25, including: 

• Increasing the number of hybrid sessions available through our programme and making all of our induction/reorientation events and writers’ retreats hybrid as standard; 

• Tweaking our standard start and end times for events to avoid school runs and to generally help facilitate engagement for part-time students, carers and distance learners; 

• Removing the need for postgraduate research students to book the majority of the Doctoral Academy’s study space, and exploring the possibility of making the building accessible on a 24/7 basis;

• Overhauling our student intranet pages and updating our Learning Central module ‘Resources for Research Students’ to facilitate more effective signposting, with both launching in October;

• Designing a new Peer Support Network, also due to launch in October, which will provide an opportunity for postgraduate research students with similar interests and motivations to form peer support groups;

• Exploring options for more tailored support for disabled and neurodiverse postgraduate research students;

• Moving our learning events email, which contains dates for upcoming sessions, from a monthly to weekly basis. 

We look forward to working towards these goals this year. Keep an eye on our updates over the coming months for more information about these changes and other innovations.  

– Dr James Farror, Head of Doctoral Academy Development and Experience 

You are now able to view all of our established courses and sessions that we intend to run again in 2024/25 on the Learner Portal.

It’s important to note that we plan our programme reactively throughout the year, based on student demand and the availability of our trainers/facilitators. Therefore, we don’t have dates for all of our sessions agreed just yet, but these will be added on a sporadic basis over the coming months.

As such, we strongly advise that you keep an eye out for our monthly learning event email, which contain dates for upcoming sessions, and most importantly that you continue to check the Learner Portal regularly.